[PHOTO] Fort York, looking east

When I was solicited by Flickr to submit my best photo to their Your Best Shot 2016 group, it took me only a moment for me to make my choice.

The above photo is a full version of a squared-off photo I took on Instagram late this May, while I was exploring Fort York on Doors Open. Beyond the low stone wall of the fort's northern rim, everything stretches out: First the rest of the fort, then the glittering condo towers of the waterfront and the CN Tower. This photo is the background image I use on my various mobile devices: It just works that much for me.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO recommends five neighbourhoods for people looking for apartments.


• False Steps' Paul Drye describes a failed European-Russian project for a manned capsule.


• Language Log looks at the oddity of English pronunciations of words in foreign languages, like placenames, with no connection to how these words are pronounced in English.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is critical of the coverage given to Trump and Clinton, finding it biased against the latter.


• Marginal Revolution suggests that seasteading has a future.


• The NYRB Daily suggests Israeli colonization will mean the end of the traditional lifestyle of Palestinian Bedouin.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw reports on the spread of the red fire ant in Australia.


• Peter Rukavina describes the unusual round boundaries of the Island village of Crapaud.


• Savage Minds shares a lovely timeline of the history of anthropology.


• Torontoist looks at the origins of human rights law in Ontario.


• Window on Eurasia argues Russia's position as the Soviet successor state hampers its ability to engage with Communism, and reports on Belarus' concern at the dominance of local television by Russian imports.

[ISL] Ahoy, young libertarian! Seasteading could very well be the wave of the future"

Tyler Cowen's Bloomberg View article about seasteading was picked up by the National Post. I think he's correct in arguing that seasteading should not be seen as a way to escape from community, mainly, but that it should instead be seen as a way to escape to some other place. Whether or not it is viable is another question entirely.

Following the election of Donald Trump, some Americans are asking whether they should move to Canada. Yet a more radical idea is re-emerging as a vehicle for political liberty, namely seasteading. That’s the founding of new and separate governance units on previously unoccupied territory, possibly on the open seas.

Imagine, for instance, autonomously governed sea platforms, with a limited number of citizens selling health and financial services to the rest of the world. Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence might make the construction and settlement of such institutions more practical than it seemed 15 years ago.

Although seasteading is sometimes viewed as an extension of self-indulgent Silicon Valley utopianism, we should not dismiss the idea too quickly. Variants on seasteading led to the founding of the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with the caveat that conquest was involved, as these territories were not unsettled at the time. Circa 2016, there is a potential seasteading experiment due in French Polynesia. The melting of the Arctic ice may open up new areas for human settlement. Chinese construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea raises the prospect that the private sector, or a more liberty-oriented government, might someday do the same. Along more speculative lines, there is talk about someday colonizing Mars or even Titan, a moon of Saturn.

Seasteading obviously faces significant obstacles. The eventual constraint is probably not technology in the absolute sense, but whether there is enough economic motive to forsake the benefits of densely populated human settlements and the protection of traditional nation-states. Many nations have effective corporate tax rates in the 10- to 20-per cent range, which doesn’t seem confiscatory enough to take to the high seas for economic motives alone.

Furthermore, current outposts such as Dubai, Singapore and the Cayman Islands offer varied legal and regulatory environments for doing business, in addition to the comforts of landlubber society. More and more foreign businesses are incorporating in Delaware to enjoy the benefits of American law. So, for all the inefficiencies and petty tyrannies of the modern world, seasteading faces pretty stiff competition.

[ISL] "Iceland vs. Iceland: British food chain looks to thaw trademark feud"

The Globe and Mail carried James Davey's Reuters report noting the conflict between the country of Iceland and the British-based food retailer of the same name. I have to admit to being surprised, still, that the name of a country could have been so appropriated by an unrelated business.

British supermarket chain Iceland Foods is sending a delegation to “The Land of Fire and Ice” in an effort to resolve a legal dispute over the trademark registration of the word “Iceland”.

Iceland Foods, whose 22,000 employees would be equivalent to almost 7 per cent of Iceland the country’s population, said it was urgently seeking a meeting after the north Atlantic island said last week it had taken legal action against the retailer.

Reykjavik said Iceland Food’s Europe-wide registration had often left Icelandic firms unable to describe their products as Icelandic and it had asked the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EU-IPO) to invalidate it.

Iceland Foods said on Tuesday it wanted “to lay out constructive proposals for resumption of the peaceful co-existence between the company and country that had prevailed for the previous 46 years.”

The supermarket, which is best known for its frozen foods, said it had a long history of friendly relations with Iceland, which lies about 800 km (500 miles) northwest of Scotland and has a population of 329,100.

[LINK] "U.K.'s Lingering `Lost Decade' Pushes Carney Into Marx's Arms"

Bloomberg's Lucy Meakin notes Bank of England governor Mark Carney's speech warning of political tumult ahead, a consequence of a bad decade for wage increases.

The mid-19th century was a period of social and political upheaval in the U.K. economy that saw an international financial crisis and technological revolution. Sound familiar? Mark Carney thinks so.

The Bank of England governor described the economy as experiencing its “first lost decade since the 1860s” in a speech this week. Citing wage growth that’s at its slowest since that period, he said globalization for some has come to be associated with low pay, job insecurity and inequality.

“Substitute Northern Rock for Overend Gurney; Uber and machine learning for the Spinning Jenny and the steam engine; and Twitter for the telegraph; and you have the dynamics that echo those of 150 years ago,” he said.

Not even the Great Depression or two world wars produced a period of falling real wages like the present one, BOE data show.

[. . .]

Carney noted in his speech that the economic upheavals of the mid-19th century produced Karl Marx, who argued that the only way for workers to throw off the yoke of wage labor is revolution. Carney said the key is to redistribute the benefits of globalization and do more to ensure workers have the right skills to thrive.

[LINK] "Trump Can't Deliver the Rust Belt Jobs He Promised Because Work Has Changed"

Wired's Joseph Bien-Kahn notes that technological changes in the workplace make Trump's promises to restore the Rust Belt's jobs simply impossible.

On Election Night, voters in northeastern Ohio’s Trumbull and Ashtabula counties made Sean O’Brien—a three-term Democratic state representative—their state senator. They also helped make Donald Trump president. In 2012, 60 percent of Trumbull’s largely white, working class electorate voted for Barack Obama. In 2016, they flipped their support to the populist GOP candidate who offered his own promises for change.

The partisan shift surprised O’Brien, but he realized it shouldn’t have. Days before the election, O’Brien’s cousin snapped a photo of his own front yard and sent it to the soon-to-be state senator. A Trump sign stood right next to one supporting O’Brien.

“He didn’t expect a lot of what Trump promised, and yet he still voted for him,” O’Brien said. “Maybe he won’t bring jobs back, but at least it’s somebody new, it’s somebody outside. It’s somebody who’s talking his talk, their talk, our constituents’ talk.”

In the Rust Belt, that talk is all about the factories that left and the jobs that went with them. Trump succeeded in places like Trumbull and Ashtabula by convincing voters he’d truly fight to bring back their factory work. He promised to rip up trade deals, punish currency manipulators, and make it harder to outsource jobs. This was change Rust Belt voters at least wanted to believe in.

But Trump will enter office with the nearly impossible challenge of rebuilding a sector of the economy that technology has altered at least as much as globalization has. To help the constituents who were instrumental in electing him, he’ll need to get a GOP Congress to back policies at stark odds with conservative orthodoxy. Even then, the implacable forces of automation guarantee that whatever jobs may return to the Rust Belt won’t look like those of days gone by.

[LINK] "Russia's Space Program Is Blowing Up. So Are Its Rockets"

Wired's Emma Grey Ellis notes Russia's ongoing problems with its exploding rockets. What's up?

Last week, a Russian Progress cargo ship carrying supplies to the International Space Station burned up in the atmosphere when the Soyuz rocket carrying it failed just a few seconds after lift off. Surprising, because the Soyuz has been a spacefaring standard since the 1960s. But also not, because 15 Russian rockets have failed since 2011, and five of them have been Soyuz.

Russian rockets give the US space program a considerable lift. Orbital ATK uses Russian RD-181s in their Antares rockets, and at the moment, Soyuz are the only rockets capable of carrying astronauts to the ISS. And while the Soyuz problem may only be a matter of a few nuts and bolts, it reflects Roscosmos’ withering workforce, dwindling funds, and systemic corruption—all of which have left the one-time space superpower in a precarious position.

The Soyuz rocket is old-school Soviet space engineering at its zenith. “Soyuz are extremely reliable,” says Asif Siddiqi, a space historian at Fordham University. But lately Russian engineers have been tinkering with the design. Most of the Soyuz failures in the last few years been traced back to funkiness in the rocket’s revamped upper stages. “They’re sort of fudging with the basic technology,” Siddiqi says. “Any time they change something, it’s very risky.” Early reports on last week’s failure point to the rocket’s third stage, but are murky on specifics.

The origin of the failure might not be in Russia. “Previous failures have involved upper stages being replaced with components built in Ukraine,” says John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “They may not be Russian problems at all, except in making sure the system works properly.” (We asked Logsdon if he thought political tensions between Russia and Ukraine might be a factor, and he didn’t “even want to go there.”)

The troubles in the Russian space program’s supply chain are symptoms of systemic problems. The Russian space program barely survived the fall of the Soviet Union, and has been flagging since. That’s showing itself in poor quality control and brain-drain. “The Russian program is actually suffering the same problem as the US,” Logsdon says. “Their core engineers are retiring, and the young ones are attracted to more lucrative employment, or emigrating.”

You can hardly blame the young, would-be spacecraft engineers. According to Pavel Luzin, an international relations lecturer at Russia’s Perm University, the starting salary for someone doing quality checks on the production of the Progress cargo spacecraft starts at $200 per month. Engineers don’t do much better: about $270 per month. “How can good spacecrafts be produced within such a system?” Luzin says. He also notes the low wages smart more because Roscosmos higher ups like Igor Komarov and Dmitry Rogozin rake in millions. Remember, income disparity led to revolution in Russia. It’s not something they just shrug off.

[URBAN NOTE] Chris Selley on the National Post on the upcoming Presto nightmare

Chris Selley's National Post article makes for dispiriting reading.

What’s green, about six feet tall, costs as much as a subcompact car, has almost no moving parts and can’t perform its simple task roughly 40 per cent of the time? Metrolinx’s 75 self-service Presto card reloaders, that’s what. They take money from your debit or credit card and put it on your Presto card. That is all they do. They are such unusually simple components of an automated fare system, in fact, that manufacturers Scheidt & Bachmann had to custom-design them, according to Robert Hollis, Metrolinx’s executive vice-president in charge of Presto.

As simple as they are, however, they suck. In a recent nine-day period I visited 54 of them across the subway network, testing a theory — and proving it well beyond my expectations. Six of the machines were signed out of order. And a further 14 of them appeared to be in working order, but simply wouldn’t acknowledge the presence of a Presto card. That’s a failure rate of 37 per cent.

To make matters worse, Hollis told me, system monitoring can’t even tell when the latter problem occurs. So the machines just sit there, useless, waiting to infuriate the next customer who will shortly thereafter have to suffer the indignity of paying cash for a train ride in 2016.

“We know that customers aren’t happy. We know the issues are out there,” Hollis told me in the GO concourse at Union Station, where we observed commuters recharging their cards (mostly) without incident. (In the TTC concourse it was 0-for-2: one was signed out of order; the other wouldn’t read cards.)

Metrolinx is already testing the “next generation” of these machines, said Hollis, which among other things have more computing “horsepower.” But “lack of horsepower” is only a suspected cause of the problem. “It could be the complex interaction between the machine and the credit card company and the network,” suggested Hollis, but “the vendor doesn’t have the data to understand what’s going on yet.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Town of Banff staff ask for interest-free loans to buy homes elsewhere"

CBC News reports on the scale of the housing crunch in the Alberta mountain resort town of Banff.

Employees of the Town of Banff can't always afford to live in the townsite, so a program offering interest-free loans to home buyers has expanded its reach.

Spokesperson Kelly Gibson says a few employees approached the town saying they couldn't afford to buy a home in Banff, and requested the program include nearby Canmore and the Bow Valley.

"Town of Banff employees face the same challenges as other Banff employees in finding a place to call home. As the employer, we want to make sure that the employees have a place to put in roots," he said.

The program, which provides ten-year interest-free loans to qualified employees, has been in place since 2009 and costs the town very little, said Gibson.

"It's more efficient if we can retain employees, rather than recruit and hire new employees."

[LINK] "Cute 'Kawaii' Culture May Be Holding Back Japan's Women"

The opinions expressed by Akie Abe, wife of the Japanese premier, in a Bloomberg article by Isabel Reynolds and Emi Nobuhiro, strike me as eminently plausible. If women are forced to be cute and not allowed to be competent, of course their presences will be limited.

Japan’s women are being held back by pressure from men to be cute, rather than capable, the wife of Japan’s prime minister said in an interview.

"Men’s thinking has not changed," 54-year-old Akie Abe said last week when asked how society’s attitude to women has evolved since she joined the workforce in her twenties. "Japanese men tend to prefer cute women over capable and hardworking women. So women try to appear to be the type that men like. Even very talented women put on cutesy ways."

While many more women now continue working after marriage and children, "big companies are a man’s world," she said. "Some things have changed and others haven’t."

Akie said she supports her husband Shinzo Abe’s efforts to have women play a more active role in society. The premier has championed a goal of having at least 30 percent of management roles in all fields filled by women, in a bid to make up for the labor shortage caused by Japan’s aging and shrinking population. The country is making slow progress toward those targets -- a government survey published last year found 8.3 percent of those in section chief or higher positions in business were female, compared with 7.5 percent the year before.

"My feeling is that women don’t necessarily want to work in the same way as men, such as thinking it’s good to be promoted. There is now an effort to change the way people work, working efficiently within a given time rather than late at night, so that women’s viewpoints can be reflected in a way they haven’t been in the past," she said.

[PHOTO] Strawberry Fields, five days later

I thought I'll tonight repost my post of the 11th of June, 2012, resharing the photos I took that day of the Strawberry Fields memorial to John Lennon in New York City's Central Park.

* * *

I certainly wasn't the only person visiting Strawberry Fields earlier this afternoon, a section of Central Park adjacent to West 72nd Street that was landscaped as a memorial to John Lennon. The central focus of the area is a circular mosaic, inlaid with the word "Imagine" at the centre and surrounded by offerings and people genuflecting, like the woman wearing a Doctor Who T-shirt in the first photo below, or--unphotographed--like me.