[PHOTO] Blueberry field, Rollo Bay, at low tide

This year, my aunt and uncle's blueberry field seemed to be lying fallow, leaving an unbroken sight line descending down to the waterfront. Compare these pictures from last year's visit.

[LINK] "Iron Price War Deepens Crisis in Ebola-Stricken Sierra Leone"

This multiply-authored Bloomberg article touches upon the economic ramifications of the West African Ebola epidemic.

Sulaiman Kamara, a handcart pusher in Freetown before the outbreak began in May, used to earn 50,000 leones ($11) a day, before a shriveling economy took away his job. The 42-year-old father of three now hawks cigarettes and candy on streets with shuttered shops and restaurants, empty hotels and idling taxis. Some days, he’s lucky to make a quarter of his former earnings.

Things are about to get worse again. Iron ore, the biggest export earner, is in a major tailspin, leaving Sierra Leone’s two miners on the verge of collapse and jeopardizing 16 percent of gross domestic product in a country where output per person was just $809 last year.

Used in steelmaking, iron ore has slumped 39 percent this year as the world’s largest miners spend billions of dollars expanding giant pits in Australia and Brazil. Digging up ore that’s less rich in iron and operating with restrictions imposed to stop the disease’s spread, local producers can’t compete.

“The impact of Ebola in terms of iron-ore revenue is huge,” said Lansana Fofanah, a senior economist in Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Development. “Iron ore is responsible for the country’s double-digit growth since 2011 until the Ebola outbreak.”

Iron ore contributes more in mining royalties than any other mineral to government revenue, which has plunged since the outbreak began, and as the budget deficit worsens, the International Monetary Fund has agreed to step in.

[LINK] "A Secret of Uber's Success: Struggling Workers"

Katie Benner's Bloomberg View article suggesting that Uber and like on-demand, on-line services reflect a weak labour market with desperate workers. It's worth noting that when I linked to this article briefly last night, a commenter on my Livejournal noted that "taxis are typically a "when libertarians are right" market artificially constrained by government regulations. Medallions -- the legal right to pick up passengers -- may go for hundreds of thousands of dollars, for a service that most adult Americans with a GPS unit can provide. [. . .] So yeah, Uber et al. may be riding on high unemployment, but there's also a distorted market that's just ripe for disruption. Prices can undercut taxis from bringing supply and demand closer together, not just from exploiting unused labor.

Thoughts?

To become ubiquitous, these companies need lots and lots of cheap contract laborers to serve customers who want them to be available at the push of a smartphone button. But there's a big vulnerability in all of these business models: They wouldn’t work if they had to offer full-time jobs with substantial benefits, and the reliance on contract workers to sustain this burgeoning market has become controversial. Kevin Roose recently noted in New York magazine that an emerging "1099 economy" explains how it's "possible for a cash-flush tech start-up to have homeless workers."

The popular on-call car service, Uber, for example, needs hordes of drivers if it wants to make taxis obsolete and largely eliminate the use of personal cars, presumptions that underpin the company's $18 billion stock market valuation. Nasty battles for drivers between Uber and one of its competitors, Lyft, further hammer home that point.

People are attracted to on-demand gigs because more solid full-time work is still hard to come by in a U.S. economy that has rebounded for everyone but average workers. Should the job market eventually strengthen, workers will have more options and may choose jobs that give them more benefits and more financial control over their lives.

[. . .]

Since the recession began, U.S. unemployment has fallen from a peak of about 10 percent to 6.1 percent. Even so, Brookings Economist Gary Burtless says that an additional two million or so people have been out of work for so long that they've stopped looking for work. And University of Chicago economist Steven Davis says that job fluidity (econo-speak for workers' ability to move from job to job) is stagnant. All of this depresses wages and locks many younger and less educated workers out of full-time positions.

[. . .]

Cash-strapped middle-class Americans are in a better position to work for an employment-on-demand company, since they’re more likely to own a smartphone and a car than the ranks of the perpetually unemployed or adults who are born into generational poverty. But some companies are finding creative ways to expand their labor pools.

Uber, for example, rents smartphones to its workers. It also offers them discounted auto loans and lease agreements to help them secure cars. When Uber announced those financing deals last year, its chief executive, Travis Kalanick told Bloomberg News: “The demand is there, but if we don’t get the cars on the road -- if we don’t help our partners and drivers get cars on the road -- then it just doesn’t matter. We’re just not going to be able to grow.”

[LINK] "P.E.I. faces housing glut"

CBC reports on a glut of housing on Prince Edward Island, as the home-buying population declines while the supply remains stable. I'd also suggest that much of the existing supply, especially in rural regions remote from major centres, is in the wrong place. Some of it might never sell.

Supply is up and demand is down in the P.E.I. housing market, creating a buyers' market where homes are slow to sell.

Linda Mosher is one of the lucky people in the market looking for a new home, but only after suffering through the process of trying to sell hers.

"It was on the market before it was actually sold for about 11 months, which was at least six months longer than we expected it might be," said Mosher.

The P.E.I. Real Estate Association says the number of listings on the Island is up 10 per cent over last year. Association president Wayne Ellis told CBC News more older Islanders are selling their homes and downsizing, and others are moving out west. With so many houses to choose from, he said potential buyers are taking their time.

Sales this year are down 10 per cent.

"There's lots of choice, and it's a perfect buyers' market right now," said Ellis.

[URBAN NOTE] "Fears that shoddy Toronto condos could become future slums"

This Thomson-Reuters article at CBC makes the decent point that the future of Toronto's condos, built shoddily and not up to handling environmental conditions, is dire. Might the booming new neighbourhoods on the waterfront and elsewhere become slums in a couple of decades?

While Toronto's housing boom rolls on, some of the housing itself is falling apart.

Canada's biggest city has more than 100,000 units under construction as developers and investors seek to cash in on condo prices that are up 25.7 per cent in the city over the past five years. The trouble is, many buildings are so poorly constructed that some residents fear that the money-spinners of today could become the slums of the future.

Glass panels have been falling off newly built Toronto condos, including the luxury Shangri-La and Trump towers and a dozen or more lesser-known buildings across the city. New buildings suffer from water leaks and poor insulation, making them ill-suited to Canadian weather.

"Many buildings that went up during the beginning of this condo boom are already facing high repair costs, and in many cases lawsuits, because they are built so shabbily," said Ted Kesik, a professor of building science at the University of Toronto.

"The life cycle is clear. They are okay for the first five years, they gradually deteriorate by year 10 ... and don't even reach year 20 before significant remedial work needs to be done. In 50 years these buildings may well become an urban slum."

'In 50 years these buildings may well become an urban slum.'- Ted Kesik, professor of building science at the University of Toronto

That's all far in the future for builders and investors who have had little trouble finding tenants, with the city's rental vacancy rate at 1.8 per cent. Condo prices are rising across the country, up 16.8 per cent in the last five years, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association.

[LINK] "Q&A: Cave Art Older, More Widespread Than Thought, Archaeologist Says"

National Geographic has a nice brief interview with Alistair Pike, a British archeologist who found ancient cave art in Indonesia. This matters.

How surprising is it to find such old cave paintings outside Europe?

Absolutely this changes our views and is going to make us ask a lot of questions about the causes rather than the origins of cave art. The hand stencils are almost identical to ones seen in Europe and elsewhere around the world, which is really interesting.

We've been shown here that our views have been too "Eurocentric" about the origins of cave painting. It's not surprising that people for years thought that France and Spain was the home for this art. That's where it was found in caves. But now we have new evidence.

Before this find, what was the history of cave painting thought to be?

Well, one argument that was made largely because we had all these European cave paintings was that when modern humans migrated to Europe, they competed with Neanderthals for caves, which led to a cultural change.

Other forms of symbolism existed, but people just didn't need to paint caves outside of Europe.

What's clear now is that the phenomenon happened elsewhere.

[LINK] "Scenes from the New American Dustbowl"

Alan Heathcock's Medium article takes a look at the consequences of California's catastrophic drought for the dying farm communities of the Central Valley. Written very much from the perspective of farmers, with as one commenter notes little attention being paid to the migrant farm workers who actually grew the food or to the environments who make good points about the viability of farming in a semi-desert climate, "Scenes from the New American Dustbowl" chronicles a sad story of utter collapse. Is this what the future will look like, with despair and resentment aplenty?

Andy Vidak, cherry farmer and senator for the 16th district, [. . .] for the next 20 minutes goes deeply and conspiratorially political. He educates me on a long series of decisions made by a “small percentage of politicians who also hold the most power” in collaboration with radical environmentalists who have worked to destroy the farmers of the Central Valley. “This is perfect politics,” Vidak says. “The perfect war. This valley is conservative.” He contends big-city liberals are aware they can save the salmon, don the hero’s crown for environmentalists, all while eliminating conservative political opposition.

I respectfully suggest that one of the most productive agricultural valleys in the world couldn’t possibly be sacrificed in the name of politics — there’s a population base, functioning towns.

“No,” Vidak counters. “People in New York or Boise, Idaho, don’t care where their produce comes from.” The valley of farmers could go away, and so long as the product came from elsewhere no one would care.

He tells me a story of a local food bank. It was mid-summer and the men in line would be working if so much land wasn’t left unfarmed due to the water crisis. If that wasn’t bad enough, he noticed the food bank was handing out cans of carrots grown in China.

“Carrots from China,” Vidak says. “All while we have two of the largest carrot growers in the world down here. That’s just wrong.”

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• 3 Quarks Daily talks about the complexities of gentrification in Brooklyn.


• A BCer in Toronto wonders where school trustee Harout Manougian stands on the subject of gay-straight alliances.


• Centauri Dreams discusses the mapping of the weather on WASP-43b.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper discussing the complexities of mapping the non-spherical moons of Mars.


• Far Outliers looks at the role of ethnic minorities in late 19th century Pacific coast baseball in the US.


• Language Hat looks at folkloric elements in the Russian Chronicles.


• Savage Minds celebrates the 13th of October as Indigenous Peoples Day.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that the Ukrainian war has radicalized the Russian right.

[LINK] "The Anti-Vaxxers Are Spreading Ebola Conspiracy Theories"

Jesus fucking Christ. What the hell, people? What the hell. From io9's Mark Strauss:

The anti-vaccination movement sees itself fighting against the shadowy forces of the CDC, Big Pharma, the media and their "lies" about immunization. And now, with the Ebola outbreak, they've cranked their crazy-meter up to 11, declaring the disease to be everything from an autism cover-up to a complete fraud.

I'm something of a connoisseur of conspiracy theories. Every time there's a major world event, I play my own version of the Kevin Bacon Game and try to see how many steps it will take for people to draw a connection between Russia's annexation of Crimea and the faked Apollo Moon landing. (Bonus points if either extraterrestrials or the Freemasons are involved.)

But, rummaging through the anti-vaxxer websites gets downright creepy, given that there's already enough misinformation and panic about Ebola—and it adds yet another layer of ugliness to the psyche of people who embrace junk science at the expense of children's health.
​U.S. Emergency Rooms Are Bracing For An Ebola Panic

There have been 5,000 Ebola false alarms since the first case in the U.S. was confirmed on…Read more

As with all conspiracy theorists, the anti-vaxxer crowd is all about the "strange coincidences" of the Ebola outbreak. Thus, the tragically misnamed site, Child Health Safety, noted that the disease became big news at around the time that discredited CDC whistleblowers were preparing to make a statement about autism.