[PHOTO] Morning traffic on the TTC, subway near Spadina

[LINK] "Wal-Mart: It Came, It Conquered, Now It's Packing Up and Leaving"

Bloomberg Business' Shannon Pettypiece writes about how Wal-Mart's withdrawal from small centres in the United States is now leaving this places without retail, as Wal-Mart's entry undermined local competitors.

The Town’n Country grocery in Oriental, North Carolina, a local fixture for 44 years, closed its doors in October after a Wal-Mart store opened for business. Now, three months later -- and less than two years after Wal-Mart arrived -- the retail giant is pulling up stakes, leaving the community with no grocery store and no pharmacy.

Though mom-and-pop stores have steadily disappeared across the American landscape over the past three decades as the mega chain methodically expanded, there was at least always a Wal-Mart left behind to replace them. Now the Wal-Marts are disappearing, too.

“I was devastated when I found out. We had a pharmacy and a perfectly satisfactory grocery store. Maybe Wal-Mart sold apples for a nickel less,” said Barb Venturi, mayor pro tem for Oriental, with a population of about 900. “If you take into account what no longer having a grocery store does to property values here, it is a significant impact for us.”

Oriental is hardly alone. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said on Jan. 15 it would be closing all 102 of its smaller Express stores, many in isolated towns, to focus on its supercenters and mid-sized Neighborhood Markets. The move, which will begin by the end of the month, was a relatively quick about-face. As recently as 2014, Wal-Mart was touting the solid performance of its smaller stores and announced plans to open an additional 90.

That’s a big problem for small towns, often with proportionately large elderly populations. For the older folks of Oriental -- a retirement and summer vacation town along the Intracoastal Waterway -- the next-nearest grocery and pharmacy is a 50-minute round-trip drive.

[LINK] "Let Coal Die. Save Coal Country."

While I admire the Bloomberg View editorial board's interest in saving coal country's people, I have to wonder if it's possible. Is there any coal-mining region of any size that has successfully shifted away?

The decline of coal as a source of electric power is inevitable and well under way. This is a good thing, because whether measured by its effect on public health or its contribution to global warming, coal is more harmful than any other widely used source of electricity.

But there's a human cost to this transition: unemployment in coal country. Over the past five years, as the U.S. coal mining industry has lost 94 percent of its market value, some 15,000 jobs have disappeared in West Virginia and Kentucky alone. West Virginia's Boone County and Kentucky's Union County have lost roughly one job for every 24 residents.

Although the pain has been cruelly concentrated, it should be of national concern. That's not because the government is to blame; more than anything else, the low price of natural gas has undermined the market value of coal-fired power. But coal's decline is accelerated by public policies designed to reduce deaths from air pollution and limit climate change. And while the government is right to restrict coal's emissions, it should also help people deal with the consequences.

[ISL] "Seychelles Plans Blue Bonds to Develop Sustainable Fisheries"

Bloomberg's Paul Richardson writes about the Seychelles' green fisheries initiative.

Seychelles, an Indian Ocean archipelago off the East African coast, plans to offer so-called blue bonds, which fund the development of sustainable fisheries, to investors later this year.

The country’s Treasury is in talks with multilateral agencies including the African Development Bank and the World Bank to facilitate the sale of $10 million of the government-backed debt, Finance Minister Jean-Paul Adam said in a phone interview Jan. 22 from the capital, Victoria. The securities are modeled on green bonds, which channel their proceeds to projects that save energy, curb pollution and recycle resources.

“If you’re going to finance a fishing business it will be generally seen as a risky business and will be costed accordingly,” Adam said. “We hope to absorb this risk. And the involvement of the multilateral agencies will help reduce the cost so we get an affordable interest rate.”

Seychelles is considering the debt as its $169 million of bonds due January 2026 outperform other sub-Saharan African nations, returning 2.6 percent this year compared with an average loss of 2.9 percent among 17 countries on the continent tracked by Bloomberg. The commercial fishing industry in Seychelles, which has Africa’s biggest tuna-canning factory, is dominated by companies including Thai Union Group Pcl, Thailand’s largest seafood exporter. Fisheries account for about 1 percent of the country’s $1.4 billion economy, according to World Bank and African Development Bank data.

[ISL] "When chickens go wild"

3 Quarks Daily linked to Ewen Callaway's article in Nature examining the wild chickens of Kauai. How do imported species adapt to their new environment? What does the term "wild" mean? Great stuff.

As the two try to act casual by their rented car, a jet-black hen with splashes of iridescent green feathers pecks its way along a trail of bird feed up to a device called a goal trap. Wright tugs at a string looped around his big toe and a spring-loaded net snaps over the bird. After a moment of stunned silence, the hen erupts into squawking fury.

Opaekaa Falls, like much of Kauai, is teeming with feral chickens — free-ranging fowl related both to the domestic breeds that lay eggs or produce meat for supermarket shelves and to a more ancestral lineage imported to Hawaii hundreds of years ago.

These modern hybrids inhabit almost every corner of the island, from rugged chasms to KFC car parks. They have clucked their way into local lore and culture and are both beloved and reviled by Kauai's human occupants. Biologists, however, see in the feral animals an improbable experiment in evolution: what happens when chickens go wild?

The process of domestication has moulded animals and their genomes to thrive in human environments. Traits that ensure survival in the wild often give way to qualities that benefit humans, such as docility and fast growth. Feralization looks, on its surface, like domestication in reverse. But closer inspection suggests that the chickens of Kauai are evolving into something quite different from their wild predecessors, gaining some traits that reflect that past, but maintaining others that had been selected by humans. In this way, they are similar to other populations of animals, including dogs, pigs and sheep, that have broken free of captivity and flourished.

By looking at feral animals, some evolutionary biologists hope to determine how domestic animals and their genes change in response to natural pressures. The research could also help to inform tricky conservation questions about how such animals affect native species, and ultimately whether and how to control them.

[LINK] "Once Upon a Time, Yahoo Was the Most Important Internet Company"

Wired's Julia Greenberg maps the growth, and decline, of Yahoo. That this Internet company, particularly through Flickr, is one I regularly use just makes me nervous.

Silicon Valley is full of giants. But one seems to be slowly disappearing. Yahoo was once an Internet titan, a ruler of the web. Now its future appears to be in question.

Investors worry about what will happen to Yahoo once it spins off its stake in Chinese behemoth Alibaba—or if it can’t. Meanwhile, among consumers, Yahoo has an identity problem—what, exactly, does Yahoo do?

These questions have come to a head again over the past week or so as activist shareholders called for Yahoo to sell its Internet business. High profile chief executive Marissa Mayer’s future is being called into question. A wave of executives have left the company in recent months. And even something Yahoo does right—its popular fantasy sports site—is facing scrutiny from New York’s attorney general. It’s been a long slide for one of the web’s oldest businesses—so long that it can be easy to forget that Yahoo once ruled the Internet.

Yahoo was once a trailblazer: it was here before Facebook and Google. It was here before we texted, tweeted, or snapped. Its place in the history of the Internet is in some ways singular: It was for many the first way they experienced the web.

At WIRED, we’ve tracked the ups and downs of the web since its earliest days. In the process, we’ve traced the growth and decline of Yahoo itself—the rise and decline of an Internet original.

[LINK] "Can the North Caucasus adapt to political change?"

At Open Democracy, Denis Sokolov writes about the fragility of the current system in the North Caucasus in the context of Russia's various issues. Things are set to break.

If 2015 was the year of purges of regional elites for the North Caucasus, 2016 will be the year of political innovation. And Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has been first off the starting blocks.

Kadyrov began the year by announcing a new political agenda — at a federal, not just regional level. In a joint statement with two other senior Chechen politicians, Kadyrov labelled Russia’s opposition and dissenters as “enemies of the people” and “traitors”.

The North Caucasus, and particularly Dagestan and Ingushetia in the region’s east, is bound to respond to these clear (and pretty scary) signals. Especially when you consider that the local political process is already moving in a dangerous direction. Both state and public institutions are in decline. They are short of money and no longer care where and how they get it. The law of ‘might is right’ is back, and it isn’t just Kadyrov’s dog Tarzan who is sharpening his fangs.

In the 1990s, when the Russian state was ‘on its knees’, the institutional specifics of the Caucasus came to the fore in the growth of ethnic nationalist movements, a rise in religious fervour and the emergence of Islamist parties.

In its most brutal moments, the national-liberation struggle descended into open war, while global Islam became the ideology behind the ‘village revolutions’ in rural Dagestan. At one point, two villages (Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi) declared themselves an ‘independent Islamic state’.

During the gloomy years of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, the infamous ‘power vertical’ was built in the North Caucasus, and with it, the emergence of a new political class. This new group came from former members of the FSB and other defence and law enforcement operatives.

[LINK] On the possible rarity of sustainable extraterrestrial life as an answer to the Fermi paradox

This is not an implausible outcome, although I would note we need much more information about the cosmos. From Centauri Dreams:

[A]long come Aditya Chopra and Charles Lineweaver (Australian National University), with a new paper suggesting a different kind of filter. The authors call it the Gaian Bottleneck, and it’s a filter that life on Earth has already passed through. The scenario is that life is fragile enough that it rarely develops into intelligence.

The reason: Young planetary environments are unstable. The life that does emerge needs to find ways to regulate greenhouse gases like water and carbon to keep surface temperatures in the habitable range. Normally we think of the decrease in the incoming bombardment of Solar System debris going back 4.5 billion years and extending to about 3.8 Gya as being a key to making the Earth more suitable for life, but the Gaian Bottleneck sees early life as being under strong selection pressure to modify and regulate its own environment. From the paper:

… bombardment rates inevitably decrease in the circumstellar habitable zones (CHZs) of stars, but the timescales for the evolution of Gaian regulation are probably unpredictable and would not inevitably evolve rapidly (or at all). Thus, if there is anything special about what happened on Earth to allow life to persist here, it might have less to do with the decreasing bombardment rate in the Hadean, or special chemical ingredients, or sources of free energy, or even a rare recipe for the emergence of life. The existence of life on Earth today might have more to do with the unusually rapid biological evolution of effective niche construction and Gaian regulation in the first billion years. Habitability and habitable zones would then not only be a passive abiotic property of stellar and planetary physics and chemistry (such as stellar luminosity, initial water content, and decreasing bombardment rate) but would also be a result of early life’s ability to influence initially abiotic geochemical cycles and turn them into the life-mediated biogeochemical cycles that we are familiar with on the current Earth…

In this view, we have gotten through the filter already, finding ourselves in a position not shared by planets around us. Conceivably, both Mars and Venus were once habitable, but a billion years after formation, Venus turns into the hell it is today and Mars goes into a deep freeze. Chopra and Lineweaver argue that if there was early microbial life on either world, it was unable to stabilize its environment, whereas on Earth, life played an active role in doing just that[.]

Universe Today has more.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Centauri Dreams looks at the earliest mentions of Proxima Centauri in science fiction.


• D-Brief notes that early oceans could moderate chemical reactions that could lead to life.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that most super-Earths around red dwarfs may not be close enough to burn off their excess hydrogen/helium envelopes.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at the continuing Russian war in Syria.


• Geocurrents notes, using the Philippines as an example, that sea can unite language communities more readily than otherwise.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer is wondering why Bloomberg would run for president.


• Torontoist enlists Steve Munro to see if John Tory's new mass transit plan would work for Scarborough.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that Melissa Click, an American university professor who called--on video!--for some muscle to chase away student journalists from a protest, has been charged with assault.


• The Financial Times' The World notes that Russia's economic troubles are, indirectly, promoting radical Islam in Central Asian countries dépendent on migrant workers.

[LINK] "Alberta's 2015 job losses worst since early 1980s recession: Statscan"

Continuing the theme of yesterday's Demography Matters post about Alberta, in today's issue of The Globe and Mail David Parkinson reports that things in Alberta are now almost unprecedentedly bad.

Alberta suffered its worst year for employment losses since the dark days of the National Energy Program and early 1980s recession, revised labour figures from Statistics Canada show.

Statscan’s annual revisions of its national Labour Force Survey data ratcheted up Alberta’s job losses last year to 19,600, from the 14,600 the statistical agency originally reported in its final 2015 survey released in early January, as the province’s energy-driven economy buckled under the severe drop in oil prices.

Those losses exceed the 17,000 jobs Alberta shed in the Great Recession in 2009. It’s the worst year since 1982, when the province lost more than 45,000 jobs, amid the double whammy of a global recession and the notorious NEP, a federal government program that capped prices, raised taxes and dramatically discouraged investment in the oil patch. A deep decline in investment in the sector has again been the key driver of the job losses in the past year.

Alberta ended 2015 with an unemployment rate of 7.1 per cent – up sharply from 4.8 per cent when the year began. It’s the province’s highest unemployment rate in 20 years.

Worse, most of the Alberta revision reflects a downgrade in full-time employment. Alberta lost 51,000 full-time jobs last year, compared with the originally reported 44,000, as its economy has buckled under the severe drop in oil prices.