[PHOTO] Hanging out at the Galleria

Visiting the Galleria Shopping Mall at Dupont and Dufferin last night to pick up some groceries, I snapped this picture as an addenum to the set I posted already. The main hall, looking past the small in-mall restaurant towards the Zellers anchor store, does indeed look--as a Flickr commenter suggests--as if the Galleria's designers had sought inspiration for the mall's design in the street. "The 1970s idea of returning to traditional streets for interior design is really evident in this photo with the cafe seating on a brick-like floor. Just Photoshop away the walls and ceilings, and add a Victorian streetscape and the sky, and it'll become clear." The problem with this is that apart from the lack of scenery, there's simply too much space; it's cavernous.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Crooked Timber hosts a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel about the Greek economic crisis. What will you, aided by your assistant, do to solve the crisis? In the comments and elsewhere, readers report opting for Argentine-style bankruptcy as the least bad option.


• Daniel Drezner is worried about Iran, suspecting that the ambiguity of the American government as to the ultimate goal of sanctions on Iran (limiting nuclear proliferation or regime change) may back the United States into a corner where regime change is the only option.


• The Global Sociology Blog notes that the culture warriors' opposition to liberalized divorce laws and growing singledom may be ill-founded, inasmuch as the traditional family may no longer be a useful unit and it's--at the very least--open to question whether or not singles are more isolated than people in couples.


• The Global Sociology Blog also looks at the tradition and mechanics of patriarchy in Afghanistan and Kashmir.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the question of what web documents get tweeted on Twitter as opposed to liked on Facebook. The consensus seems to be that Twitter, as the more professional medium, carries links to more professional documents than a more informal Facebook.


• Another post at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to the Crooked Timber CYOA novella I mentioned above but also to a statement by the Greek foreign minister warning that the country's military can still respond to threats from Turkey.


• Spacing Toronto's Luca de Franco interviews Sharon Switzer, the woman who curates art displays on video monitors in the subway.


• Strange Maps explores through maps the idea of a Scandinavian Scotland.

[DM] "Some population-related links"

I've a post up at Demography Matters linking to a variety of population-related blog posts, everything from ethnic tensions in Hong Kong to the history of the Armenian diaspora to shifts within Canada a first-person experience of assisted reproduction.

Go, read.

[URBAN NOTE] "Test Drive a Metropass"

Fittingly enough for a time of turmoil at the Toronto Transit Commission, Jamie Bradburn's most recent Historicist post at Torontoist takes a look at the genesis at one of the signal achievements of the TTC, the unlimited use of the TTC enabled by the pay-by-the-month Metropass.

During an April Fools’ Day TTC meeting in 1980, Metro Toronto Chairman Paul Godfrey became the first person to purchase a Metropass. Like the first batch of actual users, Godfrey had a two-part pass: a laminated photo ID card (passholder number 000001) and a portion replaced monthly. Perhaps sensing the spirit of the day, he asked those in the room, “Does this mean I have to turn my chauffeur in?”

While Godfrey’s chauffeur didn’t apply for unemployment insurance, the Metropass enabled some of its early users to reduce their driving time. Buyers were also relieved to no longer fumble for cash fares, tickets, or tokens. Early user feedback proved positive, with many users wondering why the TTC hadn’t implemented a pass sooner.

The answer is easy—change takes a long time at the TTC. As the commission’s August 1978 report A Study of Monthly Passes noted, “Many transit operators have implemented passes without any study whatsoever. It would be irresponsible for the TTC to do so, because of the amounts of money involved. What is appropriate for other cities may not be appropriate for Toronto.” Throughout the late 1970s, the TTC studied the feasibility of a user pass in relation to increased ridership, infrastructure costs, and potential revenue losses. A survey conducted in 1976, which likely used more scientific methods of questioning about public transit than employed by our current mayor, showed that the public was receptive to using passes.

Bradburn's history of the genesis of the Metropass underlines the extent to which the monthly TTC pass helps generate communities, by removing barriers of cost to movement from one point to another (to another, to another). Transit builds cities.

A test project conducted at Sherbourne Station sold passes to 107 riders that were good only for the month of April 1978. The test data showed that these pass users increased their number of trips by 15 to 20 per cent. The resulting report outlined pros (public demand, increased annual trips, user convenience) and cons (disruptions to the system, start-up costs, revenue losses, lack of trackable ridership info) if a pass was implemented. For a time, the TTC contemplated selling passes solely through employers as was the practice in Boston and Chicago. In the end, a pilot project approved by Metro Council in January 1980 approved a $26 pass for public sale that would go into use as of May 1, 1980. Estimates suggested that the $1.9 million implementation cost would generate 3.5 million more trips per year.

[. . .]

People quickly forgot the Metropass was technically still in its testing phase. Sales continued to rise throughout 1981 despite a $3.75 per month price increase. Revenue losses were lower than projected ($1.5 million as opposed to $3 million). According to the report The Metropass Experiment, issued in December 1981, the typical Metropass buyer lived in East York, Toronto or the City of York. They were commuters “who used the TTC for more than just work-related trips. Most do not have the opportunity to increase their peak period use of the system and so the pass encourages increased off-peak travel for entertainment, shopping and other purposes.”

And yes, for the record since I've moved to Toronto in June 2004 I have owned a Metropass for every month, save for those unfortunate months where I've lost the card and opted instead for the costlier but still cost-effective weekly passes.

[URBAN NOTE] A note on "Almost Rich"

I didn't expect John Scalzi to link to and comment on the Toronto Life photo essay "Almost Rich". Toronto Life is a good magazine, don't get me wrong, a glossy monthly concentrating on events and trends in the Toronto area that has won multiple national awards since its 1966 founding, but it's such a Toronto-centered publication that I couldn't imagine its appeal to non-Torontonians (at very most, non-Canadians).

I was wrong. Scalzi's post, "Not Being Able to Scrape By With $200k Is Usually Your Own Fault", picks up on the theme of the 1% popularized by the Occupy movement, and runs with it, angrily.

Gawker, that great engine of social egalitarianism, points us to an article in Toronto Life about the Canadian 1% and how they try to get by in Toronto, Canada’s largest city. The implication is that even with $196,000, which is the income line for the 1% in that far northern country (and that’s Canadian dollars, mind you!), it’s sometimes difficult to make ends meet in that nation’s largest city.

Then you read the article, which does things like complaining that after you subtract “wardrobe refreshes” and “the cost of sushi, pad thai and butter chicken” ordered in three nights a week because of being too tired to cook, $10,400 a month doesn’t go very far, and then drops this bomb:

Then there’s the stuff that fills our houses—the calibre of which is the subject of intense, unspoken competition among my peers and neighbours. During my entire childhood, spent in a comfortable lower-upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Montreal, I am quite sure that my mother did not waste a single moment worrying about replacing her laminate kitchen counters with granite or marble. There was no such thing as a $1,000 Bugaboo stroller, or anything like it. You could host a casual weekend party without spending a fortune on artisanal cheeses. Living the good life simply wasn’t the full-time, across-the-retail-spectrum pursuit it has now become.

Aaaaaaand that’s then I want to start pressing the “It’s time for the goddamned revolution” button. By the time we get to the breakdowns of the monthly expenses of the seven 1% households profiled for the article, which features line items like $800 a month on wine and $1200 for the vacation house on the lake, I’m vaguely surprised Toronto isn’t on fire. The only people I feel any sort of commonality with are the immigrant family, who pack their own lunches for work and aside from the hair salon line item seem to have some perspective on their cash. The retired couple who invested well and are living off the proceeds also gets a pass, because, hey, that’s the goal, right? Otherwise: Purification by flame.

The problem here is that once again we’re confronted with the interesting paradox of “the 1%,” which is that the incomes of within the 1% are surprisingly heterogeneous. It’s a category that encompasses both people with six-figure annual incomes and people making nine-figure annual incomes; likewise, it’s people with seven-figure net worths and people with eleven-figure net worths. The 99% of the 1% do not have helipads and supermodels and dormitories or libraries named after them at their elite school alma maters; they have mortgages and expenses and their kids’ educations will be a non-trivial percentage of their total net worth. So if you’re on the bottom rung of society’s topmost ladder, you’re going to feel you have more in common with the middle class than with the stinkin’ rich, because as a practical matter you do.

But that doesn’t mean you’re middle class, or that your problems are middle class problems; it also means that when you complain about how hard it is to make ends meet and yet you’ve got the lake cottage and you spend $1,000 a month on clothes, the people who really are middle and lower class are going to look at you like, would you please just shut up, you arrogant rich bastard, before I put you and your whole family up against a wall. This is especially true when, as is the case of the Toronto Life article, the heart of the “problem” is that apparently it’s harder today than ever before to maintain and display the overt social cues of your petit bourgeois status.

This article may have managed to enter the global mythology of the 1%. That's fine, but--as pointed out by many commenters--it also speaks directly to specifically Torontonian concerns: the higher cost of living in Toronto as compared to the rest of Canada, the comparison-shopping originating from profound insecurity that's practically a Toronto trademark (Toronto to other world cities, households to other households). Torontonians want to have it all, and Torontonians want to think that they can realistically aspire to it, perhaps especially the petit bourgeois Torontonians who form the core demographic of Toronto Life's readership.

(Then again, wanting to have it all, and wanting to think that it's realistic to aspire to having it all, are pretty universal desires among human beings outside Toronto, too. Right?)

[LINK] Two links about social networking undermining journalistic practice

I've come across two very considerate essays examining the ways in which social networking bypasses existing journalistic networks and the ethics of their so doing. Jeff Jedras in "Vikileaks and the death of the journalist as news gatekeeper" at A BCer in Toronto talks about the potential for good in removing the shackles of the journalistic establishment from public discourse, while Zeynap Tufekci in "The Syrian Uprising will be Live-Streamed: Youtube & The Surveillance Revolution" at Technosociology talks about the potential bad that comes from allowing every atrocity to be preserved and recorded in minute detail.

First, Jedras. "Vikileaks" refers to @Vikileaks30, a Twitter account created by an unknown person after Canadian Public Security Minister Vic Toews introduced Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. An amendment to the Criminal Code that would give police sweeping powers to intercept individuals' Internet communications without warrants, the bill was harshly criticized by opposition; Toews responded by saying that opposition MPs could "either stand with us or with the child pornographers." @Vikileaks30--traced by the Ottawa Citizen to someone operating on the grounds of the House of Commons--then appeared and began tweeting extracts from Toews' 2008 divorce. Unfettered by the traditional reticence of Canadian journalism, Vikileaks30 revealed that Toews' marriage apparently came to an end after he fathered a child with his children's babysitter. After being this revelation, and much scathing criticism besides, it looks like the Conservative government is going to amend this.

Jedras' view? This, ultimately, is good, since things can't get hushed up.

What really interests me though is the reaction of the proverbial “main-stream media” to the Vikileaks story, with an Ottawa Citizen piece attempting to trace the IP address of the “@Vikileaks30 leaker” spurring endless speculation and demands to identify the person or persons responsible. It should be noted that had @Vikileaks30 given their documents to a journalist who chose to publish a story based onthem, then the media would be reminding us how important it is to protect the confidentiality of their sources. Even competing outlets wouldn’t try to unmask another journalist’s confidential source. That’s just not cricket, old boy.

[. . .]

Journalists made judgment calls every day on what is news and what isn’t, what people have a right to know, and what isn’t relevant. It's part of the job in one sense; there's always more news than column inches or air time. And they see it as a public service. But no one elected them as the arbiters of good taste. They’re accountable to no one but their publisher and the shareholders. It’s a lot of trust, and a lot of responsibility.

The internet, blogging and social media are changing all that however. Now you no longer need a printing press or a television or radio station to publish information to the masses. Anyone with an Internet connection can publish anything they want, and potentially find an audience. And the market will, in away, make its own judgment on its news worthiness. I people find it relevant,they’ll share or re-tweet it and the news finds a wider audience; if they deem it inappropriate it will wither and fade away, perhaps after first being soundly condemned.

What it means, though, is that the role of the traditional media as gatekeeper is drying, if it’s not already dead. With their breadth of reach and size of audience, the regular media is still the fastest way for news to be disseminated to the wider public. But thanks to social media, even if the press deems something“un-newsworthy,” if it gets enough traction online they eventually have no choice but to cover it anyway.

Tufekci's concern, in contrast, is that the preservation of everything--including every atrocity--and its potential for global transmission will make it impossible for people to forget. Her paradigm is the 2007 filming of an honour killing of an Iraqi Kurdish girl by her Yezidi co-religionists seems to have led directly to al-Qaeda bombings that killed hundreds of Yezidis.

One may wish that stoning death of Yazidi Kurdish young girl Du’a Khalil Aswad in 2007 was never discovered on Youtube, but that seems so trivial compared to wishing that she was never killed in such a cruel, brutal fashion. She was, though, for the alleged crime of seeing a boy of a different faith. She was murdered somewhere early in April 2007 and the video started circulating widely later that month. A few weeks after her killing, and a few months after the video was discovered and made headlines around the world, a series of bombings shook Yazidi villages near Mosul, resulting in about 800 deaths and more than 1,500 injured—making it the single biggest episode of mass killing in an act of political violence since September 11, 2001. While the culprits were never discovered, most observers traced the events to the tensions that began with the video of her death and ended in Al-Qaeda style car-bombs.

The fact that the event was filmed and uploaded to the Internet is quite striking, too, considering the community. The Yazidis are a mostly Kurdish speaking religious group in the Middle East who keep to themselves as much as they can. The reasons for their protectiveness is lengthy and complicated but is related to the fact that a central figure in their faith, Melek Taus is accused of being identical to the Muslim figure of Satan. Having faced much prosecution, and also having a contentious faith in a contentious region, Yazidi society is predicated upon keeping outsiders out and practices strict endogamy—no marriage with outsiders.

Du’a Khalil, just 17 years old, crossed just that line with her alleged relationship with, and rumored conversion to Islam. For that, she was dragged by a few dozen men who proceeded to beat her to death as she curled up on the ground, bleeding. The shaky and grainy video, which I saw in bits over the space of a few days as I could not bear to watch in in a single sitting, shows at least *three* people recording her stoning with cell phones. It is quite stunning to think—not only are they killing her –this secretive, closed society which managed to survive for thousands of years by being so guarded and cautious— her killers felt like they should film this. And, more, upload it to the Internet.

Tufekci, thinking particularly of the huge volumes of material--video, audio, text--coming out of Syria as the incipient civil war takes hold, wonders what will happen in other conflict regions.

I have more questions than answers. What does it mean that everything –ranging from the most trivial but especially the non-trivial– has such a great chance of being available worldwide? Does this level of documentation make it more likely that the international community will be compelled to react to atrocities–which will likely come with higher and higher levels of documentation? Or will this, too, become just background noise, similar to famines or disease in Africa have become for most of the world (except the victims, of course)? Does the level of documentation and surveillance make it harder to establish processes like the Truth and Reconciliation efforts in places ranging from South Africa to Guatemala? Will this amount of documentation of atrocities make divisions even more likely and pernicious–as the ability to forgive often needs some level of forgetting? And the Internet, it seems, does not forget. Will this all make regime bureaucrats more likely to defect—as “I was just pushing paper and had no idea all this was going on” has become an even weaker defense? Or will they cling to power to the very end as much as they can, knowing their victims and survivors have much evidence as well as awful reminders of their crimes?

I don’t have the answers but I’m quite convinced that we’ve entered an irreversible point in terms of documentation of our lives, including death and destruction—not just baby pictures and trips, parties and graduations. There is no going back. And tools matter just as wars with nuclear weapons are different than wars with bows and arrows, a world with cell-phone cameras in every other hand is different than a world which depended on traditional journalists and mass media gate-keepers for its news.

As a commenter at Technosociology points out, the critical issue is whether human compassion will keep pace with human technology.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the imminence of geoengineering, aka anti-deterraforming

Strictly speaking, geoengineering and terraforming are not synonyms. Wikipedia's peer-reviewed definitions define "geoengineering" as referring to "the deliberate large-scale engineering and manipulation of the planetary environment to combat or counteract anthropogenic changes in atmospheric chemistry", while "terraforming" relates to "the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology to be similar to the biosphere of Earth, in order to make it habitable by Earthlings". Geoengineering is limited in scope, applied on a world that's already Earth-like; terraforming involves schemes of much greater scope applied on worlds far more hostile than contemporary Earth. I still like to think of them as synonyms, enough that I talk "anti-deterraforming" as a synonym for "geoengineering"; I, skeptical science fiction fan that I am, woud like to think that the skills acquired in preventing the catastrophic deterioration of Earth as a human habitat could lead to the development of the techniques necessary for the far more constructive task of making other worlds suitable homes for human beings and our associated biosphere.

We are going to develop geoengineering/anti-deterraforming techniques, I'm sure. Yes, there are numerous risks--carbon dioxide leakage from sealed storage areas come quickly to mind, many others exist--but these aren't relevant. Why? Jamais Cascio makes the case that only geoengineering is capable of saving human civilization from catastrophe.

Cascio starts by noting a US government report on future energy use , one which predicts that in a "little over 10 years from now -- coal will provide 10,200 terawatt-hours (TWh) out of a total of 28,700 TWh produced around the world, annually. By 2035, it's up to 12,900 TWh out of 35,200 TWh." He then links to a study on carbon dioxide emissions and climate, tracking the volume and speed of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions needed to avoid the 2 degree Celsius global temperature rise synonymous with existential catastrophe. "[I]if we have peak emissions of around 65 gigatons of CO2 equivalent in 2025, we have to be down to under 20 GtCO2e by roughly 2035, and to zero GtCO2 shortly thereafter."

In order to achieve this switch by shifting to new methods of energy generation--wind and solar and hydroelectric and quantum vacuum effect and stellar core tap and everything you can imagine--well over half of the world's energy-generating facilities will have to be switched over in a decade. Not only electricity-generating plants, mind, but vehicles, too.

Basically, we have to replace over 21,000 TWh of electricity generation from coal and natural gas (yes, natural gas is less-harmful than coal, but still has a greenhouse impact) with an equivalent amount from some mix of renewable, hydro, and nuclear. And do it in 10 years.

Except it will have to be more than that, at least another 15,000 TWh more, because we'll have to replace all of the gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles on the roads around the world with alternative forms of transportation, all of which has to be electric (or human/animal-powered). And also add however much new power is required to run the various production lines day and night to make all of the needed photovoltaics, wind turbines, electric buses, and such.

For comparison, the world added... 15 TWh in solar in 2010.

Cascio's analysis of the consequences of the impossibility of a shift?

1) We manage to get a real global agreement in place within the next five-eight years, and spend the subsequent 25 or so years undertaking the largest industrial transformation imaginable. Politically implausible.

2) We don't get a real global agreement in place before 2025, and have to cut emissions by 10% per year (as Roberts notes, the biggest drop we've seen is 5% after the USSR's economy collapsed). Physically implausible.

3) Neither of those happen, and we start to see truly awful impacts, mostly in the developing world at first, all of which make the world politically more hostile and economically more fragile -- and make it more difficult to cut carbon emissions effectively.

This is why I think geoengineering is going to happen. Desperate people do desperate things, and when you hear sober scientists say things like population "carrying capacity estimates [are] below 1 billion people" in a world of 4 degree warming, it's hard to argue convincingly that the uncertainty and risks around geoengineering are worse.

The bolding and italicization is Cascio's, incidentally.

Cascio's analysis--and my agreement with said analysis--assumes that the survival of human civilization is an inevitability. I don't think that it is, as such, but I would like to think that human civilization is adaptive enough to realize the potential for catastrophe and act accordingly. I certainly don't see any other options to geoengineering at present if global energy consumption is as predicted.

What say you?