[PHOTO] On the future of Geary Avenue, Toronto

blogTO has written extensively in the past about Geary Avenue, an increasingly post-industrial west-east street in Davenport, just on the other side of the train tracks from me. In February 2011 it noted the decline of industry there, while two years later it introduced its readers to the street more directly and in July 2014 it noted the erection of the new Geary Lane studio. On the 4th, the Toronto Star's Stuart Berman described in "Geary Ave.: The secret life of an ugly street" how this street was starting to become trendy.

Though located just steps north of heavily trafficked Dupont St., the unremarkable, one-kilometre-long Geary Ave. — beginning at Ossington Ave. in the east and terminating just past Dufferin St. in the west — exists in the no man’s land between downtown and midtown, an area so unconcerned with keeping up appearances that its modern-furniture knock-off stores actually have names like Modern-Furniture Knock Off.

Running alongside the CP rail tracks, Geary is effectively cut off from Toronto’s urbanized core both physically and spiritually. It more closely resembles something you’d find on the city’s industrialized outskirts: a random assemblage of car-repair shops, nondescript office spaces and the greasy-spoon lunch counters that cater to them, not to mention various disused warehouses in states of serious neglect.

Up until last year, there was really only one reason to visit Geary after dark: you were among the many musicians renting a room at the labyrinthine Rehearsal Factory, the jam-space of choice for everyone from veteran rock acts like Sloan to after-work hobbyists renting by the hour. But, over the past year, Geary has become a place where local noise-makers are not only practising for their next gig but playing them, too.

Just a few doors down from the Rehearsal Factory, the street’s western dead-end has come to life with the launch of Geary Lane, a multi-purpose performance space specializing in experimental indie-rock concerts and DJ events.

On the east side of Dufferin, adjacent to three-year-old grungy taco bar Kitch, a Toronto hardcore band has taken over a basement unit in an industrial plaza and christened it S.H.I.B.G.B. (pronounced “Shee-B-G-B,” a cheeky nod to legendary New York dive CBGB), the city’s only venue devoted to all-ages punk shows. Across the street from that lies an abandoned furniture store that’s set to be transformed into the Mercury Social Club, a new restaurant and 300-person concert space due to open this spring.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s Changing Political Map"

Torontoist's Daren Foster and Paisley Rae considered how Toronto's electoral wards might be redrawn.

The last ward realignment happened in 2000, in the early days of amalgamation. Based on 1991 census data, that ward rejigging was hastily slapped together by the provincial government, which reduced the number of city councillors from 56 to 44. It was a number arrived at by the same slapdash approach the Harris government took to the entire amalgamation process: they took the 22 provincial ridings (which had been reduced to mirror the federal ridings), cut them in half and—voila!—44 wards.

Fifteen years later, the city has changed. In time for the 2015 election, the federal riding boundaries have been adjusted, increasing from 22 to 25 ridings to reflect Toronto’s population growth. The provincial government is expected to follow suit. While it certainly isn’t necessary for the city to follow the same maps of the federal and provincial governments, judging from some of the public feedback at consultations held in December and January, there will be pressure to go that route.

The real pressure to redraw the lines of the city, however, stems from Toronto’s robust population growth and the unevenness of its distribution. Population-wise, some wards have grown more unequal than others. This imbalance creates inequitable local representation, and makes it more difficult for the most populous wards to serve their constituents effectively.

It is impossible to draw up wards with the exact number of residents to a person, in part because other considerations factor into new ward boundaries. Keeping “communities of interest” and “traditional neighbourhoods” together, respecting the history of certain wards, and adhering to “natural and physical boundaries” like ravines, rivers, or the 401 are all elements that affect the final outcome. But it’s the population divergence in the current ward configuration that is the primary driving force behind this.

[LINK] "Brazil Dries Up and Blacks Out"

Bloomberg View's Mac Margolis notes that the drought facing Sao Paulo is really getting quite serious.

Water is to Brazilian politicians what oil is to Latin American petrocrats -- just a pipeline away, too abundant to fret over. Except when it's not.

Despite a summer storm over the weekend, Rio de Janeiro is parched, and its reservoirs are depleted. Sao Paulo is worse: the Cantareira System of interconnected lakes that supplies water to 8 million people is dipping into its "dead volume," roughly the equivalent of the red zone on your car's gas gauge.

January rains were enough to cause flash floods and craters in the streets, including one that swallowed a motorcycle in Sao Paulo, but not to top up the nation's depleted reservoirs and hydroelectric dams.

For months now, specialists have been waving the windsock over the gathering weather emergency -- not least because some 68 percent of the nation's power is hydroelectric. In Brazil, water supply is power supply. Power cuts on Jan. 19 darkened Rio, Sao Paulo and seven other Brazilian states for several hours.

Climate scientists blame forest-cutting in the Amazon basin, which damages the rainforest's capacity to pump humidity back into the atmosphere. The official response has been that this crisis is a one-off, an unseasonable conspiracy of spiking temperatures and scant rains. Mines and Energy Minister Eduardo Braga recently dismissed rationed power cuts, allowing that Brazil had technical glitches but no dearth of grid capacity. Because God is not always Brazilian, Braga also announced a rate hike plus incentives for consumers who conserve water. "Sincerely, I see no risks," he said.

[LINK] "Balkan wars: Serbia, Croatia did not commit genocide, UN court says"

I didn't link to this important news, reported by the CBC among many others. Is it too much to hope that this might lead to a thawing in intra-Yugoslav relations?

The top court of the United Nations ruled Tuesday that Serbia and Croatia did not commit genocide against each other's people during the bloody 1990s wars sparked by the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

[. . .]

The International Court of Justice said Serb forces committed widespread crimes in Croatia early in the war, but they did not amount to genocide. The 17-judge panel then ruled that a 1995 Croat offensive to win back territory from rebel
Serbs also featured serious crimes, but did not reach the level of genocide.

[. . .]

Tuesday's decision was not unexpected, as the UN's Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, a separate court also based in The Hague, has never charged any Serbs or Croats with genocide in one another's territory.

Croatia brought the case to the world court in 1999, asking judges to order Belgrade to pay compensation. Serbia later filed a counterclaim, alleging genocide by Croat forces during the 1995 "Operation Storm" military campaign.

Rejecting both cases, court President Peter Tomka stressed that many crimes happened during fighting between Serbia and Croatia and urged Belgrade and Zagreb to work together toward a lasting reconciliation.

[LINK] "Humans met Neanderthals on way out of Africa, skull suggests"

The Associated Press report carried by CBC is one news item among many pointed to our species' rich and diverse history.

A partial skull retrieved from a cave in northern Israel is shedding light on a pivotal juncture in early human history when our species was trekking out of Africa to populate other parts of the world and encountered our close cousins the Neanderthals.

'It is the first direct fossil evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals inhabited the same area at the same time.'- Bruce Latimer, Case Western Reserve University

Scientists said on Wednesday the upper part of the skull, the domed portion without the face or jaws, was unearthed in Manot Cave in Israel's Western Galilee. Scientific dating techniques determined the skull was about 55,000 years old.

The researchers said characteristics of the skull, dating from a time period when members of our species were thought to have been marching out of Africa, suggest the individual was closely related to the first Homo sapiens populations that later colonized Europe.

They also said the skull provides the first evidence that Homo sapiens inhabited that region at the same time as Neanderthals, our closest extinct human relative.

Tel Aviv University anthropologist Israel Hershkovitz, who led the study published in the journal Nature, called the skull "an important piece of the puzzle of the big story of human evolution."

The study in question is here.

[LINK] "Putting a Czech Spin on Vinyl"

Bloomberg's Mortkowitz Bauerova has a cool article explaining how a Czech firm dominated the global manufacturing of vinyl records.

Albums by Black Sabbath, David Bowie, and U2 line the walls at the headquarters of GZ Media, which last year pressed 13.7 million records for up-and-coming indie labels along with industry stalwarts such as Sony and Universal Music Group. The Czech company is riding the wave of the LP revival, thanks to a fleet of half-century-old presses still capable of producing top-quality discs. “It was our great stroke of luck that even in the meager 1980s and 1990s, when nobody was buying vinyl anymore, the management decided to keep the machines and never threw them out,” says Michal Nemec, GZ’s sales and marketing director. In the U.S., 80 percent of record-making equipment was scrapped, says Bob Roczynski, owner and president of Record Products of America, a Hamden (Conn.) company that supplies machine parts to the dozen or so surviving plants in the U.S. Order backlogs at many of those companies now run three to four months, he says. “In the old days, if you were backlogged that much, you weren’t doing something right.”

Sales of vinyl LPs hit 9.2 million in the U.S. in 2014, a 52 percent increase from the previous year, according to Nielsen Music. Nielsen’s numbers, which go back only to the early 1990s, show sales hitting a low of 300,000 in 1993. In the U.K., record sales topped a million last year, a milestone not reached since 1996, says Official Charts Co. “There’s a kind of back-to-basics movement now, especially in London. People knit their clothes, grow their own organic veggies. Buying vinyl records is just part of that,” says a sales clerk at the Rough Trade record store in Nottingham who goes by his DJ name, Nail.

Originally named Gramofonove Zavody Lodenice, GZ pressed its first record in 1951. By the 1960s the state-owned enterprise was making LPs for much of the Soviet bloc, until cassettes and later compact discs pushed the brittle black discs to the brink of extinction. GZ embraced the new audio technologies—CDs are one of its mainstays—but didn’t stop making records entirely, though it did mothball some equipment. Winslow Partners, a U.S. private equity fund, acquired GZ in 1998 and sold it to the company’s management a few years later.

[BRIEF NOTE] On how social safety nets can encourage entrepreneurialism

Bloomberg View's Noah Smith had an interesting article, "Does the Social Safety Net Make Us Lazy?", which links to research suggesting that a social safety net does not necessarily discourage entrepreneurialism. Debates of this kind connect interestingly to discussions of a guaranteed minimum income, which, as the Mincome experiment in the Manitoba town of Dauphin conducted during the 1970s strongly suggests, can actually substantially increase the productivity and overall health of human beings by relieving them of existential concerns related to poverty. I'm personally inclined to think that social safety nets can be tuned much more finely, the better to maximize human potential. Institutions and policies like these may become increasingly necessary as globalization and technological advance limit the potential for employment across the board. What do you think?

[E]conomists Johan Hombert, an economist at HEC Paris, Antoinette Schoar of MIT, and David Sraer at the University of Califorina, Berkeley, recently found evidence that broadly fits the alternative story. The authors take advantage of a 2002 French government reform that gave extended jobless benefits to unemployed people who started their own companies. Not only would this let unemployed people keep their benefits while launching companies, but if the companies failed, the benefits would extend even further in time. Basically, the French government decided to treat entrepreneurship like any other job, with respect to benefits. In doing so, the government offered a backstop to unemployed entrepreneurs, offering them a safety net should they fail.

Hombert et al. find that the rate of entrepreneurship increased by about 10 percent, across all industries. More importantly, they found that the businesses created by people who were helped by the new law were just as high-quality as other new businesses, in terms of job creation, growth and survival rates. Actually, the entrepreneurs helped by the new policy reported higher levels of ambitiousness than other entrepreneurs -- a measure that sounds hokey, but is typically correlated with future business growth.

So in this case, a more “cuddly” form of capitalism didn’t reduce the incentive for entrepreneurship -- it increased it. That hints that, in France at least, the main constraint on entrepreneurial activity isn't lack of effort, but too much risk. The theory of Acemoglu et al., in other words, might just not describe what’s going on in France.

What about the U.S.? Harvard Business School professor Gareth Olds has found evidence that is strikingly similar to Hombert et al. In a 2014 study, he found that food-stamp assistance makes people significantly more likely to start businesses. Again, the data supports the hypothesis that “cuddly capitalism” boosts risk-taking, rather than discouraging it.

This suggests a way for us to attack the entrepreneurship deficit. In his 2008 book, "The Great Risk Shift," Jacob Hacker documents how Americans have been forced to take on more and more personal risk -- medical bankruptcies, unemployment and retirement finances all loom larger than they used to. Maybe this is scaring Americans away from entrepreneurship -- forcing them to forgo big dreams because the financial danger of failure is too great. Perhaps if the government did more to limit these risks, we would see the entrepreneurship decline reverse itself.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO notes a Toronto vigil for the Jordanian pilot murdered by ISIS.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about friends and age gaps.


• Centauri Dreams draws from Poul Anderson
  
• Crooked Timber considers trolling.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper wondering why circumbinary exoplanets are so detectable.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at robots: robots which put out fires on American navy ships, robots in China which do deliveries for Alibaba, robots which smuggle drugs.


• Far Outliers notes Singapore's pragmatism and its strong military.


• Language Log notes the language of language diversity.


• Marginal Revolution wonders about the prospects of the Euro-tied Danish crown.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes the approach of Ceres.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers scenarios for a profitable Nicaragua Canal and notes the oddities of Argentina.


• Registan looks at Mongolian investment in Tuva, and other adjacent Mongolian-influence Russian regions.


• Savage Minds looks at Iroquois linguistic J.N.B. Hewitt.


• Seriously Science notes how immigrant chimpanzees adapt tothe vocalizations of native chimps.


• Spacing Toronto talks about the need for an activist mayor in Toronto.


• Torontoist examines the history of important black bookstore Third World Books and Crafts.


• Towleroad notes many young gay/bi students are looking for sugar daddies, and notes the failure of Slovakia's anti-gay referendum.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes a new Bosnian Serb law strictly regulating offensive speech online.


• Window on Eurasia notes the collapse of the Russian world, suggests Russia should not be allowed a role in Donbas, argues that a Ukrainian scenario is unlikely in the Latvian region of Latgale and in the Baltics more broadly, and looks at the growth of fascism in Russia.

[DM] "A story of drinkers, genocide and unborn girls"

I've a post up at Demography Matters briefly noting that, over at Quartz, David Bauer has an interactive essay taking a look at the different factors in different areas of the world which lead to widely varying sex ratios. Female-selective abortion, male-heavy migration, changing patterns of life expectancy, demographic trends in the BRICs versus ost-Communist countries versus high-income countries--it's all there.