Turning its back on Georgia, as Crimea has to Kiev, disrupted Abkhazia's trade and transport and hitched its economy to the oil-fueled rouble, importing heavily from Russia, where wages and prices are much higher than in Georgia - or Ukraine.
[. . .]
Russia has said it could spend up to $7 billion this year alone to integrate Crimea's economy into its own - no simple matter when they share no land border.
In Abkhazia, by contrast, Russia invested just a tenth of that in five years, from 2009 to 2013. Just over half went on construction projects, including kindergartens, two theaters and a stadium, and the rest on pensions and state workers' wages.
[. . .]
Famed for its subtropical climate, clean sea and snow-capped mountains, Abkhazia was a favorite retreat for Georgian-born Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and a sought-after holiday destination for generations of workers from across the USSR.
Today, a broad new coastal highway covers the few miles to the Abkhazian border from the lavish Olympic Park built for this year's Sochi winter games. But after the checkpoint, the road narrows. The picturesque mountain landscape is dotted with abandoned apartment blocks with empty windows and bullet holes.
Abkhazia won the 1992-93 war against Georgia but, like its population, which was virtually halved by an exodus of refugees, tourism has never fully recovered. It is hard to find a place on the shore without a view of battle-scarred hotels. The charred hulk of a public building dominates the center of Sukhumi.
By leapfrogging from island to island across the northern Mediterranean, Neolithic people were able to quickly spread their farming lifestyle across southern Europe some 9,000 years ago, a new genetic study suggests.
Archaeological investigations have shown that individuals in the Near East first developed farming and herding around 12,000 years ago. Agriculture then quickly replaced the more mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle—in what's called the "Neolithic transition"—as farmers migrated into Europe and other parts of the world.
"The establishment of agriculture provided the possibility for population growth, and that growth led people to expand to new horizons," said University of Washington geneticist George Stamatoyannopoulos.
In a new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stamatoyannopoulos and his colleagues analyzed the DNA of individuals from modern Mediterranean populations to reconstruct the migration patterns of their ancient ancestors.
The genetic data showed that the people from the Near East migrated into Anatolia-modern—day Turkey—and then rapidly west through the islands of Greece and Sicily, before making their way north into the center of the continent.
"The gene flow was from the Near East to Anatolia, and from Anatolia to the islands," Stamatoyannopoulos said. "How well the genes mirror geography is really striking."
A new report is urging the federal government to forego the purchase of the F-35 fighter to replace Canada’s aging CF-18 fleet because its single-engine design is ill-suited to Canada’s north and dangerous to pilots.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’s report, called “One Dead Pilot” and written by UBC political science Michael Byers, says the “decision to purchase a single-engine fighter would almost inevitably result in the needless loss of Canadian pilots,” according to a news release.
In the report, Byers compares the F-35 to the Lockheed Corporation-made CF-104 Starfighter, which Canada operated from 1961 to 1987. Byers writes that while the CF-104 never saw combat, “39 Canadian pilots lost their lives while flying these planes.” Some 110 of the 239 planes were involved in a crash, giving the plane the ominous nickname “Widow Maker.”
Byers notes that 25% of the crashes were due to bird strikes and there not being a second engine to keep the plane in the air. He suggests that little has changed despite technological improvements.
“Engine failures will still occur, and when they do so away from an airport, a second engine is the only thing that can prevent a crash. The issue is especially important for Canada, which has the longest coastline in the world and vast Arctic territories,” Byers writes.
Despite myself I was always a fan of the Road to Avonlea television series. It was hokey, and not even shot on Prince Edward Island, but it was also endearing and provided a useful lens through which to look at life in contemporary Prince Edward Island.
The archetypal episode would involve some interesting character from away arriving in the village of Avonlea, with hijinks ensuing.
A long-lost huckster cousin of Aunt Heddy would show up and talk Jasper out of his inheritance.
Or a rough-looking carnie would arrive on the train from Charlottetown only to run into Olivia and sweep her off her feet.
(When I think of developer Richard Homburg and his arrival in Charlottetown as a billionaire saviour I tend to think about it in Road to Avonlea terms; it’s far more entertaining).
And so it came to pass that yesterday, while popping down the street for a quick lunch before heading to the dentist, I spied an intriguing character walking down Queen Street: an eclectically dressed woman walking a cat on a leash and carrying a well-worn hula hoop on her shoulder.
The background to the argument (as originally, even if prematurely, explored by Alvin Hansen, Günar Myrdal and even John Maynard Keynes himself in the 1930s) is that the population dynamics set in motion by the industrial revolution of the late 18th century have reached a historic turning point. In the two centuries or so that have elapsed since what many term the modern growth era got going three related but distinct processes co-existed in time:
1/ positive trend population growth
2/ positive trend economic growth
3/ steadily accelerating technical change
You could call these the "stylized facts" which characterize the modern growth era, but the secular tendency in two of them is about to undergo a seismic shift. At some stage during the 21st century global population will peak, and then gradually start to decline, probably forever more. In fact in some countries (principally in Eastern Europe, but also Japan, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Greece) population is already falling. All of Europe will likely head in this direction sometime in the 2020s, although there is considerable uncertainty still about the actual path dynamics of this process since in addition to birth rates immigration rates also play a part. At the present time some countries in Europe (the UK, Germany, Switzerland) are in receipt of large numbers of migrants annually, while others are losing working age population precisely to the aforementioned trio.
Hence the significance of the fact that Paul Krugman uses the expression "demographic transition" (for the first time to my knowledge) in the quote which opens this post. We are not talking here about some one-off problem (although often observers have spoken about Japan in just these terms), but a generalized phenomenon, a transition, something which eventually will affect all countries on the planet and our entire species. Previously people have tended to use the expression "demographic transition" to refer to the increase in the proportion of working age population and total population that accompanies the drop in fertility from high levels in less developed economies. The expression "demographic dividend" has often been used to describe the boost to economic activity this shift entails. Normally people assumed that this process would come to a halt around the 2.1tfr replacement level, but in one developed economy after another this hasn't happened, and those in which it has have been more the exception than the rule. So now reality pushes us towards a broadening in the definition of that transition towards acceptance of a later phase wherein populations age, and ultimately decline, a process which is greatly accelerated in those countries which have experienced long term very low fertility.
What Alvin Hansen and others started to think about in the 1930s was what the consequence would be for the second of the secular process which have characterized the modern growth era (positive economic growth). What happens if populations (or better put working age populations) start to shrink?
After seeing so much buzz around this "initiative", I took a look at the website promoting it and soliciting donations. The contact page lists Paul Synnott of Windsor. Turns out he worked for Campaign Research before forming his own company Polisource. Their profile says, "a New Media Solutions company focusing on conservative Canadian Politics at the Municipal, Provincial and Federal levels.
Political campaigns in Canada are subject to strict spending limits. Polisource.ca will help you deliver your message through the Internet utilizing the latest tools in a efficient, cost-effective manner."
So, as I suspected, the whole idea was concocted in a Conservative war room. Because who benefits when idiots people don't vote?
Edit: Here is the website contact page: http://www.declineyourvote.ca/contact_us
Here is Synott's LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/paulgsynnott
And here is the Polisource profile: http://www.linkedin.com/company/1857650?trk=prof-exp-company-name
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootdancing_serpent