Rich and Strange Aeons

Heh, so soon after checking in Saturday, I got a text that my laptop battery was finally at the store. One day earlier and I could have walked over, but now I was 12 km away. Sigh. Took transit over, about an hour, bus-train-walk. But yay, I have a proper laptop again! Had the store clean out the charge ports of my phones too, one probably needed it. Transit masking is meh now that the mandates are gone, maybe majority are but a large minority not.

Life since then, quiet. I haven't tried leaving the region, but I've poked around. Including on Google Street View, to see if it was even worth exploring in some directions. The highlight has been yesterday finding Minoru Park, the northern half of which has big ponds with lots of different plants around them, plus many geese and bunnies. Very very unafraid bunnies. It's a pretty good spot for forest bathing and biophilia. And I'm lucky: signs say it'll be closed for a year for construction, from "Spring 2022", but apparently not quite yet. I plan to exploit it as much as I can, including going back today (great weather, until the wind picked up) and just wallowing in tree-ness.

There's also a large river not far away, only been once.

T&T has a sign requesting customers to keep wearing masks, despite the provincial retreat, though I saw a naked nose enter as I left. It also has discounted hot food after 6 at least, so I'm enjoying nice dim sum and a huge platter of sushi.

Only 3 week delay, haha.

Still in the 'north' place of my last post. The first week felt very busy, like I couldn't believe it was only a week. The last two weeks have been faster. Not sure why, I did a bunch of walks but nothing that seems all that novel in my diary. Maybe just local shopping, checking Chinese markets, trying a Vietnamese restaurant, I dunno. Walking enough to find the big Japanese market... huh, didn't realize that was so far back.

Job hunt continues.

BC has gone back to Normal. Masking no longer required even on public transit, though "recommended". At least one big pharmacy, London Drugs, has also collapsed, with a "masks strongly recommended" sign. I am wondering if returning to the US would make sense for covid safety reasons.

Airbnb one week out was looking rather horrible, but I found a cheap 2-week place in Richmond BC, a suburb to the south of Vancouver, which holds the airport and a lot of Chinese people. Then looking for 30 day places after that has good options again, though I wonder if I want to keep staying here. OTOH I don't want to juggle disruption and job hunt that much, and have some medical concerns that might call for staying still -- or for going somewhere where I have more friends to help out if I need it.

Yeah, not a lot of exciting 'Vancouver' things recently, been more internal stuff. Reading the new Liaden book, reading Niven Warlock stories, 'being there' for a friend trying to escape Russia (they made it), reading a book on *early* Roman history, immune system stuff I've already posted about, couple new-to-me filk groups (thefaithfulsidekicks.com, viabellaband.com). And some computer stuff, that can be its own post.

I'm in Quebec City now, as of a few days ago. The train ride was okay. Luggage wasn't as strict as a Not Just Bikes video made me fear: someone did measure my big bag, but supposedly for 'statistics'; they didn't weigh it in my site; they did take it away to be checked, which on boarding seemed reasonable, there's not a lot of luggage room. Seats were padded, curved, non-inclining; most of them were raised, but mine wasn't. Cart service provided food. Clean bathroom, no water tap. Possibly a dining/lounge car I didn't walk forward enough to find. Power, didn't try the wifi.

I'm staying in the Old City, within more or less intact city walls. Pros: very easy access to lots of touristy stuff, good views of the water, old buildings, exercise via hills. Cons: obligate exercise via hills, little cheap food. There are a few cheap restaurants: Subway, McDonald's, a shawarma place. But most tend to US$16 burgers on the low end. I don't think there's a single decent grocery story in the place; I've found three convenience stores, two of them nearly useless for groceries, one of them very limited. There's a half decent store 10 minutes away outside the wall, but very downhill, and beyond an annoying intersection. In small shops, there's a cafe that may double as a bakery. But if I wanted an easy food life, I should have been 20-30 minutes west, near Rue Cartier, with two full supermarkets, and a shopping gallery with boulangerie, fromagerie, poissonerie, charcuterie... In Montreal I quickly found cheap fried chicken and such places, and had to remind myself to go get groceries; here I haven't eaten out yet at all, apart from some fish I got at the remote poissonerie.

I haven't timed it, but the Old City feels maybe 10 minutes across, wall to cliff. Perhaps longer in the orthogonal distance, if only because you're going straight up hill.

So far I've just walked around a lot, stumbling upon a plaza, an old fort museum that was closing, the Governor's Promenade, the outside of the Citadel, and the wall itself.

To explain my snarky title, the Old City was obviously built long before the car. What would have been wide streets for people, and perhaps moderate ones for carriages, have been given over to a lane of parking and a lane of car traffic, with narrow sidewalks left for humans. Despite narrowness that feels like it should be low traffic, my street (Sainte Anne) is rather busy, often with a car every few seconds. At least my street is paved with asphalt; some have brick, which probably slows the cars down but makes them even louder.

Beyond the wall, the city likes its big intersections to be car-car-pedestrian scramble -- with only 20 seconds allocated for the scramble.

My apartment is a decent size, and less unpleasantly quirky and dark than my Montreal one, though I think perhaps not vacuumed well before me, that or I've somehow tracked in a ton of junk in a few days. Sound isolation isn't great but people are usually quiet at night, so far. The kitchen is way bigger than my old one, or the one before that. I have an actual separate bedroom, not a studio, though the BR is small; separation matters for isolating you from fridge noise, among other things, though this fridge is a lot quieter than the last one anyway.

So, not every Canadian buys into War of 1812 mythology.

http://www.filibustercartoons.com/index.php/2012/06/20/1812-two-centuries-later/ describes it for foreign readers, and calls it a bunch of questionable chauvinism, and links to http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/my-ancestors-and-the-worst-thing-that-has-ever-happened-to-this-country/article4285769/
which calls it a disaster that led to two-decade low-grade civil war and a long opposition to democracy and public schools and church-state separation as dangerous American ideas, along with taking an extra 80 years to eliminate property qualifications for voting. Indians were recruited because most 'Canadians' didn't want to fight.


The colonial administrators of Upper and Lower Canada, and later the prime ministers of the Dominion of Canada, made it clear over and over, right through the 19th century, that they favoured an agrarian, resource-based model of development.

Because we had imported a population composed largely of middle managers, loyal followers and acquiescent farmers, we had the right people for this.

And in the years after 1812, we forged the institutions to make it happen.

Canada studiously avoided introducing mass public education, even at the primary-school level, until well into the 1840s, lest it spread American ideas. And, as part of the post-1812 cauterization of the border, it banished the idea of separating church and state, instead making the Anglican and Catholic faiths almost mandatory – their leaders were granted one-seventh of all land that hadn’t already been surveyed.

Before the war, Methodist and Baptist preachers from the United States had promoted a distinctly North American individ- ualism, built on a personal witness before God, that had become the most popular form of worship among newly settled Canadians.

Afterward, Canada rigidly enforced the much more hierarchical, acquiescent forms of worship by making Anglicanism and Catholicism de facto established religions and blocking U.S. preachers from crossing the border.

Big elections in Canada and the UK this past week; context and analysis. But first, the Canadian election in stick figures! Some annotation required. (Potatoes?)

( Canada )

( UK )

http://ipolitics.ca/2011/04/21/ndp-surges-in-quebec-bloc-quebecois-dropping/
Overtaking the BQ in Quebec! Tying the Liberals in national polls!
Of course, (a) keeping this and (b) translating that support into actual seats in a flawed voting system will be another matter. But still, cool!

Random
* Terrorball
* Canadian PM Harper criticizes Parliament for interfering with government (line from James Nicoll)
* Deciphering monkey calls
* Google may stop censoring in China

Krugman

* Europe: social democracy works, and doesn't lead to stagnant economies. Column and blog; the latter looks at military spending as %age of GDP, to refute the common claim that the US can't afford social democracy because we're defending the free world.

Actually, it'd be fairer to say we can't afford social democracy because we're spending too much for health care (for which we get lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, and lots of medical bankruptcies and economic distortion). Defense spendings are 1-3% of GDP... US might have drifted up to 4 or 5% what with the not-so-defensive wars. Health care spending is 8-10% for most developed countries, 15% in the US or maybe 17% by now. Obviously if you have an extra 9% of your economy handy, then it's easier to afford good schools and free child care and such, because you can have people doing useful things rather than treating prostate cancers that won't kill people or building yachts for doctors.
* Also (old), French family values. Less GDP/capita, a lot more vacation time. Something which is hard to negotiate with an employer for most people -- and even harder to negotiate on a coordinated basis, with the whole family or your friends getting vacation time.

* Europe may be okay, but the Euro currency may not be, which leads to the open question of how many currencies an area should have. He talks about closeness of trade and easy of labor mobility, and economic compensation between differently affected regions: the US is one country, the EU still isn't. Also, monetary and fiscal policy. I view it as a case of the problems that arise when levels aren't coordinated. One currency, one monetary policy, 20+ fiscal (though supposedly constrained) and employment policies, legally but not culturally or linguistically free movement. We have a different example in the US: the vaunted ability of the 50 states to experiment in undermined by free trade and travel mandates. Not that those are bad things, but they make the natural level of economic regulation and taxation be federal, not state.

* Quotes of economists denying the bubble even as it happened

Ezra Klein
* Racism and health care
* Technical: Combining the House and Senate bills, national vs. state Exchanges
* If reform is a windfall for insurers, why did they oppose it?
* The problem with Senators getting leverage by acting as if they'll oppose a bill: they convince their constituents it's a bad bill, and take blame for finally voting for it.
* How Wall Street drags down the economy
* Federal Reserve profits

Links from him:
* Mortgages are business contracts, not moral committments, and the penalties for non-payment are right there, surrendering the house. So feel free if you need to, businesses do all the time.
* Reid and color bias