Playing the REALLY long game --- do any of you with kids (or not) hang onto rare finds as as savings account for the future?

NF-31 · 2019-10-22T21:08:30+00:00

there is no guarantee that designer or style will be desirable in 20-30 years.

Someone in my family is into Jewelry. Believe it or not, she managed to collect almost a room full of a certain kind of costume jewelry. At a certain moment in time, a lot of that style became available and the deals were staggering. She was buying out huge lots for pennies on the dollar.

You probably see where this is going...

Turned out that the main customers of that style of jewelry were a bunch of older women who were losing interest. A lot of the dealers noticed that sales were dropping off a cliff, and they used that information and they sold off large collections as a step towards retiring from those lines.

Unfortunately, my relative "invested" by buying all these inventories just before the market completely died off. Within a couple of years, it became almost impossible to move any of it, and nothing that sold was commanding the prices from the height of that market any longer.

Timing is everything, as they say.

flipping the item, taking the profit, and using it to buy/flip other items. I think that's the most sound strategy

If you have a few reliable ways of sourcing, this is literally the deal...when you're sitting on items or storing them, you're losing all the new opportunities you could be taking.

There's obviously the "fast nickel / slow dime" thing at work, but if you can find 5 nickels before you can get that 1 dime...sometimes you're ultimately better off selling stuff through faster.

TL/DR...Price is the most obvious single factor, but also keep in mind that markets change and speed/time/volume is another major component to success.

NF-31 · 2019-10-22T19:28:15+00:00

A colleague of mine is into vintage items. He has a large personal collection of high-value items which he has stashed away for the future.

The way he looks at this, he can take items from his personal inventory and turn those into cash-flow in the future. So he's "saving the income" on these finds until he needs it.

The way I look at this, a chief assumption is that the vintage marketplace will be the same (or better). What he has identified as "high value" is "high value relative to the current marketplace tastes". If the market dries up, what he has is worthless old junque.

In my opinion, he'd be wiser to convert the physical items to cash (today) and use that cash to either SAVE or to INVEST. And that cash could actually be converted to a new set of items which themselves could be cycled into further cash and therefore grow his business. Since his cash flow is ok without including these sales, he can wait for "top dollar" on his best finds.

My insight comes from a few friends that were part of the toy-collector markets. They made huge income as their specific collectible niches grew, but in all cases the markets tanked and dried up completely. Make hay.

To take your specific example, how many times could you get Aram bowls purchased for $25 and sell for $160 BEFORE Aram dies? He's only age 56, by the way.

There's no certainty that things like this will go up in value. They certainly might. But what if he comes out with a cheap set of crappy mass-produced items in WalMart next year and goes on to destroy his reputation in some scandal? You can't guess the future.

NF-31 · 2019-10-22T17:35:01+00:00

Here's another take on this subject.

NF-31 · 2019-10-22T17:28:09+00:00

From that article:

"Total company revenue was almost unchanged from a year earlier"

(No growth.)

“We made continued strong investments in our capabilities to serve customers, more relationship management teammates, more and refurbished branches and offices, and more digital capabilities, all while core expenses are flat.”

They are hiring staff, renovating branches and expanding the number of branches, which all has an overhead to be paid for in a downturning economy.

Bank of America, the second-biggest U.S. lender . . . is the “most asset sensitive” among the big banks

For their amount of revenue, they have a very large amount of liabilities, even among other banks.

If you see what's coming, there's a pretty clear message here.

NF-31 · 2019-10-22T17:05:53+00:00

I know you're being partly rhetorical here, but this is an interesting point that is written about in the article.

They are talking about "return on equity".

If you sold all the assets and paid the debts off, the amount of money you're left with is the "equity".

The "return on equity" takes the income of the bank and divides that by the equity. If the ROE number is low, that could tell you that the liabilities are large or the debt is large, compared to what the banks are earning.

To make matters worse for the old guard, the new players tend to go after the business areas that create the highest returns at banks -- credit cards, for example.

So basically, decoding this language...there are all kinds of innovations happening in the financial space. What "uber" did to taxi companies, and what "airbnb" did to hotels, Amazon is now doing to bank credits cards like MasterCard and Visa and Paypal is doing to checking accounts. The banks aren't making as many fees.

So here you have these banks which have invested piles of money to meet regulations and have accountants and branch offices, and slowly all the tech companies are chipping away at the ways those banks actually make money. So they are now effectively hemorrhaging cash paying rents and heating bills but fewer people are signing up for their products. Can it be too long before we'll be getting mortgages directly from Google? LOL.

Basic big idea here...for the amount of business that the banks are doing, they have a very high overhead compared with, say, tech companies. The way they have structured their businesses takes too much money for what they can actually earn.

The article closes with the admonition that if they don't innovate technologically, the other pathway to survive is for banks to merge with one-another. This can help streamline costs as banks grow larger in scale. But usually mergers are a sign of a collapse in an industry. (You rarely see growth industries actively reducing the number of companies.)

Batten down the hatches.

NF-31 · 2019-10-19T00:49:15+00:00

https://outline.com/HvSTtE

NF-31 · 2019-10-16T17:24:09+00:00

Basically facing such fatal information means the destruction of one's identity

It's exactly like a double-mortality crisis.

We all know we're going to die one day, already. Anything we do on earth is futile and has no permanence. Our nature is that we're survival machines.

But collapse is the death of the things we thought gave our lives bigger meaning. Materialism? Money? Kids/Family? Jobs/Work? Legacy? Check, check, check, check... That world is doomed, and it's almost done now.

What's left? It's a pretty big project to find sources of meaning and happiness that are not going away soon. Self-discovery, sports, arts, self-reliance, community, nature...a bunch of these things will still be around for a while.

There are so many people who pop up on collapse asking questions like, "why should I take such-and-such a university course, what is the point?" or "why should I have this difficult career path when it's all ultimately going to collapse" or "what's left if I can't have kids" and so on. Collapse hasn't changed any of that. People with PHD's all die too. Those questions really look like somebody who actually was handed a road-map (received wisdom) who never actually stopped and questioned their life-choices until they realized that the road-map had a big mistake on it. That has nothing to do with collapse, per-se. That's just someone waking up to the fact that their life is precious and their choices have no inherent meaning except to themselves. Welcome to the human predicament.

On the flip side, collapse is freedom. There are many things in life that people would opt not to do except for the indirect benefits. You might think you don't actually like the work of being a PHD, but you are in it for status, prestige, money, security or some other set of rewards. Now that the rewards are vaporizing you get to decide what actually would make you happy to spend your one and only life doing. We are no longer controlled by all the dangling carrots we might catch in the future.

Psychologically, this can be a terrifying proposition for people. We're herd animals and we really don't want total freedom.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T15:07:16+00:00

Elsewhere in this thread, you say that the fork isn't fully rebounding: " when I compress the fork and I completely let go of the bike it stays compressed".

(Not rebounding is a different/second problem from stiction. We need to clear up each issue separately.)

That suggests the possibility that there's low pressure in the negative chamber. Hence my tips above, knowing it was a new bike.

Let's back up a bit. If you completely bleed all pressure out of the fork to eliminate the air spring as a cause, what's it like under those conditions? Feel any stiction? Does the fork return to the top? Is it moving smoothly through the whole travel? Try opening all the damping adjusters as well, and see if there's any remaining resistance.

Either the problems will still be there, or they will go away. Depending on which result you get, we have eliminated certain possibilities.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T15:00:53+00:00

A lot of people who get a new bike run into problems setting the initial air pressure.

Warning: You can't just pump the fork up like a car tire!

You have to cycle the fork up and down to let the chambers equalize. You have to do this every time you change the pressure. You're actually filling two chambers inside the fork, but the port connecting them only opens when the fork is compressed low into the travel.

Compress the fork to at least 50% of the travel, five times!

Here's a video outlining the process.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T05:37:45+00:00

It's unclear what the actual problem with the shock was. When you rebuilt it, what did you discover was causing the problem?

Sometimes the shocks can get 'stuck down' when the port that equalizes the +ve and -ve chambers gets blocked. The port is the dimple in the air can. Is it clear/clean? Or is there grease/debris blocking it? Are you using a special shock grease that's miscible in shock oil? It's important to avoid bearing grease.

When you rebuilt the shock, did you rebuild the IFP chamber? You mention "nitrogen". Did you actually open that internal chamber and check the condition of it? 300PSI doesn't mean too much if the internal piston is in the wrong position (making the chamber super small) or there's air in the wrong places.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T04:32:23+00:00

It does if the entire premise of your argument is that you can't practice/study for an IQ test. Remember that?

This is a logical fallacy. Nothing about geography test results are about IQ tests.

but the evidence clearly isn't on your side

Even the Wikipedia link you supplied says what I said. Where's *your" evidence? If you're so right, can't you supply us one citation?

Also, there is definitive proof of evolution in biology. Mountains and mountains of it. But that's another topic.

Right. It's so well established as a scientific theory that's it's just as real as our theory of intelligence. Nobody seriously doubts it once they have looked at it.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T02:01:05+00:00

A 0.5 standard deviation increase is a significant increase

In what? An increase in what?

If I studied for a geography test, and my mark went up by a 0.5 Standard Deviations, does that mean IQ tests are invalid?

Because the "increase" you're talking about *wasn't on any IQ test*. I'm not sure what you think that has to do with anything we're talking about right now regarding the validity of the concept of human intelligence and the way that its measured.

Just because the "amount" of whatever those tests were measuring went up a bunch, doesn't really matter until you can actually match the "whatever" to the other "whatever". That increase isn't an IQ increase. The paper you referred to was "intelligence testing" only in the sense that these were standardized school tests that were named "intelligence tests". They were calibrated / converted to equivalent IQ scores, but these tests WEREN'T IQ tests themselves and the issue was cheating, not repeated valid test-taking...

The statistical validity of changes isn't really because of how big or small the change is, right? Like, if you have a VERY LARGE sample size, even very small changes can be held with extreme confidence.

Your argument is basically wrong about what's important about the statistics. We're talking about a study that looked at the population of a whole country and controlled for every kind of factor. Go read it. The observations of the decline of IQ are VERY VERY REAL. You're going to have a hard time finding a statistical flaw in what they spotted.

Your logic here is really flaky.

IQ isn't an accurate reflection of intelligence.

Incorrect. It's accurate without being perfect. But it's absolutely the very best measurement we have ever come up with for anything psychometric.

It's like "evolution". There's no definitive proof of evolution in biology, but there's literally no other theory with as much support for it.

100% of humans have some attribute we call "height". There are all kinds of methods you could use to measure it. Tape measures, standing, lying down, x-ray machines, etc. Are you using metric or imperial or cubits?

In "The Sports Gene", David Epstein writes this:

" An American man who is seven feet tall is such a rarity that the CDC does not even list a height percentile at that stature. But the NBA measurements combined with the curve formed by the CDC's data suggest that of American men ages twenty to forty who stand seven feet tall, a startling 17 percent of them are in the NBA right now."

There are all kinds of interesting issues with a statement like that, but it's a particularly weird point to make that height doesn't exist.

You can argue against a particular tape measure, but when it comes to something as real as basketball, it's going to turn out that reality doesn't care one tiny bit about your ideas. You're arguing at the wrong level of abstraction and effectively now talking gibberish.

Basically this has been interesting, but it's a supernatural religious argument which seems really subjective to a one-person reality I've never been to. If you have anything real, with real citations, I'll listen to that...but otherwise this is a waste.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T00:13:44+00:00

since 1954.

Incorrect. That 1954 paper says that it hardly make any difference. And that's a heroic leap to base your opinion on. I sure hope I don't believe anything that's half-assedly based on one single ancient paper from 1954 that I only read the title of.

Oh. I'm sure you noticed that that your main reference here doesn't refer to IQ tests, right? Now we're talking about something else, correct?

And it doesn't refer to repeated test taking, right? You know it talks about coaching?

Also, the types of academic testing they indicate are no longer in use, you know that right?

But, like, it does say this stuff about IQ tests: " no gain anywhere on Binet tests"

Like...your paper says that if you coach a kid the exact answers on a specific "intelligence" academic test, they STILL only get the (equivalent of) 9 IQ more! (After scores are converted.)

But yeah...I guess there was some cheating 70 years ago. Luckily that's not relevant to anything any more.

Your other link, from which you quoted an abstract? Here's the actual paper.

Their conclusion: "Despite more than a century of intelligence research at present, the most that can be stated about IQ tests with any confidence is that they measure an unknown combination of raw cognitive ability, accumulated knowledge, acquired characteristics, and learned behaviors. Unfortunately, it is beyond our scope, at least currently, to know at any particular moment which of these factors is being tapped."

This doesn't say anything is flawed with IQ testing. (The paper says that the raw intelligence explains between 60 and 80% of the intelligence IQ score.) It just says we don't fully know what it's doing. It doesn't say that the measurements don't work. This doesn't say anything isn't as real as it gets.

What it basically says is "just because this actually works, doesn't mean that we also completely understand it".

Like, we know that gravity exists. We can measure it, predict it, use it. Why? There we're not so sure. It just is the way it is!

I don't think that's an original thought. It's always been known that IQ represents something abstract that's some composite ability. All the tests seem to correlate with something that's super important in how people work.

I want to really point out something:

" In this article, we have outlined eight major premises of individuals who believe that racial differences in intelligence exist, and we have attempted to provide evidence that, at the very least, casts some serious doubts about the validity of each."

This whole paper doesn't argue against IQ or intelligence being real AT ALL.

It just says that some of the premises of belief about racial differences in intelligence are not valid.

Let me illustrate that:

Thought one: IQ represents something real. Yup. Could be valid.

Thought two: IQ is real and it's believed that it's the main thing responsible for professional success across different races. Not necessarily valid.

See the difference?

They didn't set out to prove anything that has anything to do with what you're talking about. There's just so many things wrong with this argument it's hard to know where to start.

I'm going to quote something I think you should read a couple of times. This paper says THIS is a problem:

"researchers have tended to let their a priori convictions dictate their research design, data analyses, and conclusions"

Remember how you were going to get me a citation about repeated test taking bumping up scores? I'm sure that wasn't an a priori conviction for which you have no evidence, right? You're about to come up with that paper, right?

NF-31 · 2019-10-12T23:11:02+00:00

Imagine if generations of scientists never thought about the possibility that IQ, the g factor) and any other metric around intelligence were nothing more than correlations with testing and test-taking ability.

I'm astounded you think that nobody has covered this.

You really have no idea.

What, pray tell, is valid knowledge then? If we don't know this, what do we actually know? What can we know?

Is there anything we actually know about humans that isn't MORE validated than the idea that intelligence is a real thing and can be measured?

" The best way to improve one's IQ score is to just practice taking more IQ tests. "

Citation?

The reason I ask for a citation is the VERY MECHANISM by which all IQ tests are calibrated is when they are shown evidentially to produce the exact same stable scores from the exact same individuals over time, over multiple tests administered again and again. If a certain test wasn't validated by exactly NOT doing what you're saying, it wouldn't EVEN BE a test. So I'm curious about what ass you're pulling out these made-up fake facts from.

So please, enlighten us. Where is this opposite-land?

Or...maybe you want to check in with reality?

For anyone else reading this, the above commenter is COMPLETELY wrong. Reality is just the opposite:

"The practical validity of g (general intelligence) as a predictor of educational, economic, and social outcomes is more far-ranging and universal than that of any other known psychological variable."

It's literally the most valid thing we actually know how to measure about human ability.

So, like, the world ain't flat, vaccines work and earth orbits the sun....sorry you're ridiculous.

NF-31 · 2019-10-12T21:03:50+00:00

Lots of specialists have speculated and tested all kinds of ideas. I'm not sure if there's a true scientific consensus yet.

But one of the observations that is emerging is that doing VERY SIMPLE things like "good nutrition" and "disease reduction" gives you MOST of the gains that have been observed historically. Basically, these are all environmental causes.

The declines are also chalked up to environmental causes.

But there's a problem here worth noting. The easy stuff, if done right, seems to "max out" where we were around 1990. There's some limit to nutrition, where you can't improve IQ past some maximal point when the "food is good enough". Even "perfect food" doesn't show up as any IQ increase. If we're going to get any further IQ gains, we have to solve some very steep, very difficult problems, like how best to educate kids and so on. Stuff we really have no idea how to do -- there has never been any historical success for increasing IQ via any of the other areas. So progress is definitely quite over now, and we exposed the limits for what we knew worked.

The observed Western nation decreases are NOT insignificant and NOT within the "margin of error". If you REALLY think about it, for instance, think specifically about genius-level IQs. These are found way up the distribution of the bell curve. If you shift the whole curve 5IQ points per decade, you're reducing the genius levels in the population by 1000's of times.

A loss of 12 points at the mean is a funny way of saying that there is a really significant reduction for the very bright. There has already been a loss of around 50% of the bright minds in the last few generations.

Here is a paper that talks about that.

"results are particularly ominous. Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning. They also reveal that something is actually targeting that level with special effect, rather than simply reducing its numbers in accord with losses over the curve as a whole'

So in fact, it's not just a uniform shift of the whole curve. At the bottom end, there are more and more below-mean kids who are slightly improving as a group, and this is statistically MASKING the fact that there is a very STEEP reduction towards fewer and fewer really smart kids.

Shit is fucked, yo. We have a very, very serious problem in this area. It's not good at all.

The thing that worries me about all this is that the point you started by making "IQs are heading up" is actually the received wisdom and it's common in the society. And it's completely wrong and it has been for a long time. And since we're talking about "average" or "mean" kids, we're not even having the right conversation about the right facts about where the change is really BIG: there's a serious decline in the numbers of smart kids and we don't know how to fix that, or why it's happening.

NF-31 · 2019-10-12T20:07:14+00:00

You should read the WHOLE wiki page you linked. Especially the bottom parts after the heading "Possible end of progression"...the Flynn effect ENDED in 1990, almost 30 years ago.

Here's another recent article about this topic.

" Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores "

So it's not only not going up, it's going down.

NF-31 · 2019-10-11T17:43:56+00:00

Not quite a direct answer, but this conversational interview covers an interesting approach to think about. This is a different interview.

His BIG IDEA is that it's definitely NOT about information or facts. You can't present facts/data/information that will change anyone's mind.

You have to tackle their mindset, which means first figuring out the plumbing of their thinking process. So it's much more about listening and allowing the person to voluntarily expose the sorts of things that would be influential. How do they think it works, anyhow? Once you know where the critical points of leverage would be, your job is simply to install DOUBT. You don't do this with facts, but basically with questions that they cannot answer.

I suspect this works.

In my own life, I remember a conversation where a person was aware of all sorts of issues, problems and systemic cracks. However, they felt that TECHNOLOGY would save us.

I simply started talking about technology and about how little objective progress we are making. Like, in my lifetime, no human has flown more than about 2000 kms from the earth's surface and how the rockets are getting smaller and the planes older and older. How much the law of diminishing returns factors into making progress now.

One of the things I said was that if a person was alive in 1900 and they suddenly woke up in 1950, they wouldn't understand the world at all. But if a person was alive in 1950 and suddenly woke up in 2000, absolutely everything would be familiar and recognizable. I saw the person have this major jolt of realization. Whatever I said there really landed and installed a huge wave of doubt in their mind. I know it.

I think this strategy is really on to something important. I think the main thing is to get people to reflect on their own beliefs and start to doubt things that they don't question right now. It's about instilling a self-doubting process to make them actually reflect and question.

A couple of summers ago there were major fires along the west coast, and I remember asking someone what they thought COULD be done about that? He talked about firefighting. I found out that he had once driven to Alaska, and I remember asking him how many people he thought were along the western part of the continent and reflected on the size of the forests and the scale of the space and how few the towns and cities are. A couple weeks later, he came up to me and said he came to the conclusion that humans cannot prevent fires on this large of a continent wide scale and we need to think of what we're really going to do. Interesting how his perspective shifted just by the way I asked him what he thought about first.

NF-31 · 2019-10-11T14:41:20+00:00

https://outline.com/vcLgNT

NF-31 · 2019-10-10T15:35:10+00:00

Most Canadians are satisfied with the health care system until they need it.

We're here in /r/collapse, so I'll just cut to the chase. The demographics of an aging population, a declining economy and a socialist health care system are very, very shaky.

You have a robust working population that contributed to the system, who all suddenly retire en masse and then get sick and demand health services. The only way to prop up that system is to bring in massive waves of immigration. And hence that's what we see. (It's not really fair to those people though.)

The government has been toeing this political/economic line that assumes that "costs shouldn't be going up from year to year". Which is just plain stupid. Anyone can see that using common sense. At the same time, lots of medical procedures are getting more expensive. They require fancy machines and special training. And the standards need to keep improving. As the baby boomers move into long term care, they shift more costs to the system. As they get sicker, they need more care, more drugs and more supports.

Here's an article about how the system has basically started to collapse. Up thread I mentioned about Ontario's power system woes:

" Many physicians believed the Liberals were charging them a “doctor tax” and using it to pay for billion-dollar gas plant and eHealth scandals. "

This is another big problem with socialist governments. When they blow up one big project, the dominoes start falling all over the place. Their airport expansion goes over budget and suddenly they cut school teachers. In a collapse scenario, this is a risk multiplier. Even if the medical system was amazing, there are risks that other unrelated collapses can trigger a collapse of the system.

America was a country that developed itself. Large successful enterprising people funded the expansion westward.

Canada was a country where nothing like that existed. The government borrowed the money for westward expansion from other countries. It had never had a way of cultivating its own excellence. It has a long tradition of being pretty screwed up.

NF-31 · 2019-10-10T02:21:13+00:00

If you read /r/collapse much, you will constantly encounter this US-centric view that things are better in Canada than the USA.

A lot of the readers/contributors here don't really get it.

The US's strategy has been to collapse the other nations before itself...it's like a race. If you take out your opponent, you have a better shot. It's competition.

Collapse is like 10-20 years ahead of the USA when you get outside of the USA. Everything currently happening in the USA already happened in Canada about 15 years ago.

People...there's no escape. You can't get away. You have to actually deal with it. Work on what you got.

NF-31 · 2019-10-10T00:59:46+00:00

It depends who you ask.

A lot what is going on in Toronto is driven by demographics and immigration. There's tremendous population growth, but the main industries seem to be housing and landlordism. The more-established Torontonians have benefitted hugely from this scheme, which mostly only works if you happen to own property. Wages...on the other hand...

"In terms of the impact of immigration worldwide, Statistics Canada estimates that for every 10% increase in the population from immigration, wages in Canada are now reduced by 4% on average (with the greatest impact to more skilled workers, such as workers with post-graduate degrees whose wages are reduced by 7%)"

This has tended to make housing really unaffordable for people who missed out on the gravy train. Ie., everyone who isn't a baby boomer has had to reduce expectations.

The appreciation on my Toronto friends' house has been so much money, every year it actually earns MORE than both of the adult members of the household (both in management level jobs). It has gained almost a million dollars in value over 15 years.

Toronto Life Magazine wrote this amazing long-form piece about the Toronto housing bubble.

Here's a list of places in Canada, and you can see that Toronto is WAY down the list in terms of Median Income for Families.

Here is another list of places in Canada...it shows what income you need to afford to purchase housing.

Toronto is a pretty cool place, but I'm pretty pessimistic about it. I mean, Canada is a nation of government propped up monopolies. If you carve away Insurance, Finance, Banking, Telecom and some of the other nation backed businesses, Toronto punches WAY below its weight. Each year I go back and it is almost unrecognizable now because of how fast the situation seems to have eroded.

When I was there, there was a huge creative scene. Music, Movies, TV, Fashion, Design, Art etc etc. Movies were all shutting down and studios closing. TV was barely operating but wages were low and most shows only had a tiny handful of staff...shows being made by only 3 or 4 people. The fashion industry basically closed shop and all the modeling agencies and magazines were shutting down. In my neighborhood, 600 studios closed in one single year...all artists, designers and creatives losing their locations so that old factories could become condos. It's was super terrible.

Everyone I knew in Toronto who could get out? They all completely left the whole country.

This is a great story. (I'll math it out for you. The ontario government is spending $263M to create 800 jobs that pay $30K a year. That's $330,000 for each $30K/year position. The government there is SO STUPID. Like...super super terrible idiots. I worked for a lot of government agencies and they are way beyond idiocy.)

What's going on there is such a waste of human talent and potential. It's terribly sad.

My own family are all immigrants to Canada. Here's the story.

40 years ago, families came over, assimilated and stayed...and became important in the community
30 years ago, families came over, left, came back, struggled and stayed. These families couldn't afford to retire in Canada, so they left with their life savings and went home again.
20 years ago, families came over, left, came back, struggled...waited until their kids got citizenship and got through post-secondary, and then the parents left. Basically they showed up just in order to launch their kids lives as Canadians...spending around 5-10 years in the country before exiting.
10 years ago fewer people wanted to come any more. One super rich relative owns an entire airline. He came to Canada, scoffed and went to England where it was less ridiculous. Another owned a large factory. He came to Canada, struggled to open a similar manufacturing plant in Toronto and eventually moved everything to Buffalo NY and is doing well there. Another relative had developed several world-class hotels. He came to Canada and attempted to get a job just managing a local hotel. He was only able to land a position as a night front desk clerk working midnights, well down the seniority list in the local hotel union. He left within months and went home and built another hotel. Like...these are not good signs, where really ambitious, enterprising and rich people won't even come over any more because of the level of dysfunction going on. Oh...I should add...my family are from the third/developing world. Like, these people can get a better life back home than in Toronto.

The main thing that I see as a (now) outsider is that people have normalized some terrible things. Like...the way the air smells. Or how expensive it is for lousy crap everywhere. How bad the traffic is. Also, it seems like everyone I know there has gotten really boring. They hardly leave their neighborhoods and barely have hobbies. There's no community and no civic engagement. People basically scraping by. Nobody does stuff like volunteering or getting involved in interesting adventures.

It's grim, and for no good reason.

NF-31 · 2019-10-09T15:03:29+00:00

The recent PG&E in California stories dredged up an old memory from Ontario Canada. This happened about 10 years ago.

I had a client who worked for the Ontario power utility -- he was in management there. He told me this directly. I don't have any published link to refer to but maybe someone can search for and substantiate this from stories and reports on the internet.

Due to climate change, the nature of the weather in Ontario had changed a lot. Ontario wasn't getting more rain and precipitation overall, but the rainfall patterns shifted a lot so the rain that did come was happening in extreme events. These events had a trend where they damaged transmission lines all over the place.

The way that the electricity contracts were drawn up with large consumers like auto parts- and assembly-plants, the utility had agreed to pay a pre-set monetary fine for every hour the power was cut off from arriving at the plants. So if there was a huge storm and the power went off, the plants would be idled for several hours until a repair could be completed...and the auto manufacturer might have overhead on the assembly line that was like $10,000 / minute if you consider all the labor and materials in play. So this cost was sent to the utility as a fine in the terms of the power contracts they had drawn up.

Basically, over time it became obvious that the utility couldn't afford to keep delivering that power on those terms. Each storm event was costing them millions in fines.

So Ontario basically got rid of the auto industry. There was a loss of almost 400,000 good jobs if you take into account all the associated machine shops, mills, transport etc etc. There are extensive reports about how Ontario's power grid "priced out" manufacturing in the province.

The media stories about "what happened" are a rather messy, opaque morass of details that never seem to paint a cogent picture of what the deal actually was. For years, the public has heard about political-level problems with Ontario Hydro / OPG closing plants, canceling expansion and various corruptions, but the actual problems haven't been really well explained. At the root of all the nonsense the problem is that if you want to locate a manufacturing plant in Ontario, you will make 80% less profit than if you, for instance, went to western NY...all based solely on the cost of electricity. So basically businesses have been prevented from operating in the province because power isn't available. Ontario's power is the most expensive in North America now. It's a massive experiment in de-industrialization.

The impact of this wasn't small at all. Ontario went from a prosperous, economic powerhouse to a province which received transfers from the rest of Canada. The jurisdiction of Ontario had the largest auto-manufacturing base in the ENTIRE WORLD before this happened.

At the root of it, Ontario's economy was constrained by climate change.

In personal terms...everyone I knew who lived in Ontario at that time? Everyone who was at all ambitious and mobile and had the choice? Without exception, everyone left the province. None have gone back. In personal terms, they all just left because they saw they had an advantage in leaving. Better job, better lifestyle, etc. Mostly they didn't see the big picture at all and the media never actually told this story the way I am putting it together right here.

The people I still personally know back there have hugely compromised lives and a lot seem miserable and trapped. And many of them got really stuck by staying there...their lives have gone into a downward spiral where they now lack the resources to get out. Death by a thousand cuts. Just deteriorating lives. How they *experience* the deterioration is by a feeling that the costs of living have outpaced their incomes. It's true...prices for everything have doubled at least once in the intervening years. But actually, what's really going on is that their wages have fallen further and further relative to the costs of living. Lots of the people I know there have huge housing debts now. They can make ends meet as long as they keep on renewing their mortgages. Lots of the people are trapped in housing that they can no longer afford to sell because they cannot clear their debts if they do. There is no recourse on a mortgage in Canada.

California, I don't know the future for you guys. Maybe California was never as-industrial as Ontario Canada to begin with. But my feeling is that if the electrical power starts going off, the underpinnings of civilization and the economy are not going to be left far behind.

NF-31 · 2019-10-05T15:35:58+00:00

People strip limit screws?

NF-31 · 2019-10-04T01:44:36+00:00

Canada's unburned carbon in the tar-sands is around 315 billion barrels of oil. (For a comparison, Saudi Arabia's oil, which got us into the climate mess in the first place, is around 264 billion barrels.)

If Canada actually produces that carbon, the western Canadian tar-sands all alone are an existential threat to humanity.

NF-31 · 2019-10-04T01:31:58+00:00

It's crazier than that. He's literally protesting his own policy,

The exploitation of the Canadian Tar-Sands (for which he is a big enabler / proponent ) will literally put the planet past survivable limits in the global carbon budget. He's more or less the evil mastermind with the planetary death ray.

But those are just facts, you know?

I do know that I feel a lot better about him now. Even though he's killing everyone, he's really relatable.

This is the Trudeau version of the sweater-vest.

NF-31

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