Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Helen Collis reports that European governments are only now starting to acknowledge the large number of people - particularly of prime working age - faced with severely reduced functions due to long COVID. And Matt Elliott discusses how a push toward improved ventilation is needed to reduce the damage from this pandemic and the next.
- Meanwhile, Kendall Latimer reports on the glaring lack of mental health treatment in Saskatchewan due to a desperate lack of care providers.
- ProPublica offers a detailed look at the people with the highest incomes in the U.S. - along with the pitiful amounts of tax many pay in comparison to their distortionary fortunes. Philippe Heim and Bertrand Badre recognize that systemic inequality is ultimately a threat even to the banks and financial-sector actors who are making massive profits exploiting it. And David Macdonald highlights how Canadian workers have been seeing their incomes erode compared to inflation - even as the door is being slammed shut in response to demands to at least keep up with the added profits banked over the past two years.
- Molly Taft examines the role of carbon removal in the effort to avert climate breakdown, along with the risk that it will be used by denialists and fossil fuel interests to delay any transition to a sustainable society. Amy Westervelt reports on corporate polluters' interference in any attempt to pursue global climate action. Cloe Logan calls out the inexcusable choice of federal regulators to ignore the carbon emissions caused by the products of oil and gas projects in order to approve them. And Lucie Edwardson reports on the overbuilding of Alberta's electrical grid which has resulted in consumers paying more to put assets in the hands of private utilities.
- Finally, John Michael McGrath discusses the need for progressive parties to develop responses to Pierre Poilievre's attempt to turn a complaint about "gatekeepers" generally into an excuse to turn over housing policy entirely to private developers. [Update: And John Lorinc rightly calls out the flaws in Poilievre's rhetoric - though it's worth noting that the answer can't merely be to go far out of people's way to implausibly assert that government is helpless, particularly when Lorinc himself recognizes available policy choices to actually improve the availability of housing.]
I can provide sapphire housing for the Inuit and poor nations like Botswana where aluminum is near; our stock is too good to use such a material.
ReplyDeleteI've ranked Charest, Poillievre, and Trudeau re: 6 Future Economy portfolios.
Space.Nanotech.COVID economy.Health/Medicine.Q-of-Life.Leadership/Defence.
Charest wins space. Trudeau having Garneau beats Transport Pierre.
Charest wins nanotech coming from Sherbrooke. Trudeau funding drug nanoparticles comes in 2nd. Trudeau's Covid EI win the Covid Economy/ Pierre wins second on fintech and finance.Even insurance is getting an appreciating IT slice now.
Trudeau funding women and children $5000/yr wins on health. Charest a close 2nd being on a biotech board. Q-of-L is Charest coming from the biggest university town in Canada. Trudeau is second as capitalism lets good leaders spend public cash for only two terms before failing to consider whether big companies have a good profitable portfolio. Trudeau wins Q-of-L having Liberal advisors from the 1970's and '90s as his role models. Charest keeps supply chains open for individuals; is 2nd.
On leadership Charest is 2nd letting cdns from everywhere in, but being old. Pierre 1st. He attacks mentally ill people. Trudeau is too pro-human-rights.
2 pts for 1st and one for second gives: Trudeau 8, Charest 7, Pierre 3. As a Liberal Pierre might beat the second best Liberal. If the choice is a space economy 10x Earth's mines and ethane and medical imaging from the distant future, or fintech and oil exploration, the Liberals would choose correctly.