YOU KNOW IT'S HARD OUT HERE FOR A PIIIIIIIIIIMMMPP

http://entertainment.sympatico.msn.cbc.ca/Home/ContentPosting.htm?newsitemid=arts-cities-study&feedname=CBC-ARTS-V2&show=True&number=5&showbyline=True&abc=abc



There may be more artists living in Toronto than any other large Canadian city, but Vancouver has the highest concentration of artists in its labour force, says a new government-funded report.

CBC Arts

Research firm Hill Strategies released a study Wednesday giving a rundown of the number of artists living in major cities across Canada. The report, entitled Artists in Large Canadian Cities, is the final instalment in the firm's series of studies profiling artists across the country and based on information from Statistics Canada's 2001 census.

According to Hamilton, Ont.-based researcher Kelly Hill, 70 per cent of Canada's artists live in large cities, defined as those with populations greater than 50,000 people.

Canadians are increasingly interested in how the arts may contribute to a city's quality and affect its "social and economic vitality," Hill writes in the report.

"The arts are seen to be an important factor in attracting talented people, jobs and investment to communities," he said. "A strong, artistic community can therefore enhance a whole community's well-being."

The study reveals that British Columbia has a number of strong artistic communities, with Vancouver and Victoria ranked first and second in a list of large cities with the highest concentration of arts workers among its total labour force (2.4 per cent for Vancouver, two per cent for Victoria).

However, when considering sheer numbers, Toronto continues to dominate the scene.
Approximately 21,000 artists are employed in the Ontario capital - nearly double the number working in the study's second-ranked city, Montreal (10,100 artists), and almost triple the 7,300 artists working in third-ranked Vancouver.

Toronto is also the large city where artists earn the most on average: $34,100 a year. Rounding out the top ranked cities - salary-wise - are North Vancouver ($33,700); Ajax, Ont. ($31,800); Pickering, Ont. ($31,000); Ottawa ($29,700); and Vancouver ($29,400).

However, an artist's life continues to be a tough one. Previous Hill Strategies reports have said that the nearly 131,000 Canadians employed in the arts earn an average annual salary of $23,500 - 26 per cent lower than the average annual salary for all Canadian workers.

Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Ontario Arts Council, the study was compiled by Hill Strategies Research Inc.

The report classified artists as those who worked in nine categories: actors; artisans and craftspersons; conductors, composers and arrangers; dancers; musicians and singers; other performers (e.g. circus artists, puppeteers); painters, sculptors and other visual artists; producers, directors, choreographers and related occupations; and writers.

wow

the critics are harsh.

down 50 readers this week, from 120 to 70.

i'll come up with something to win back the hearts and souls of the leisure class.

god save the interweb

i still feel that the net is coming out of its incubation to really find its legs with regards to its power and potential. at least, for the things i enjoy, it seems to be blossoming.

i listen to lectures from stanford university on my ipod. they're brilliant. This is what an ipod was built for - CHOICE. a univerally accessible media outlet, combined with a global, instant public. podcast-wise, i'm still just a consumer. blogging is still a task, at times. vlogging or podcasting would require a staff.

right now, i'm happy to be a consumer of this 'new' wave:

feeling music? WHAM (by george, i think he's got it! - check the shirt).

feeling studious? podcast that stanford lecture on shakespeare, american foreign policy, happiness, or scientific breakthroughs.

want to see my friend's art? When i do, I head on over to sweet lou's site here and see what he's got cooking.

or i spend some time at jumping joel's site here (sorry, sweet joel just doesn't sound right, although it's true).

or i can check out some good times at all day breakfast, where i can combine crafty chris mccawley with jumping joel. my people are all over the net. way to spread the seed boyos!

i have been spending a lot of work hours HERE, finally getting through to some people and making headway on obtaining my British citizenship. took forever, but my passport is getting closer.

whenever i want to look into something, explore it a little more thoroughly, i head over to wikipidea. it's a great concept, with even better results. My land, my dad , and my current job.

good job, interweb!

i get most of my new music from here. the site is run by a girl in New York, so there's a disproportionate amount of songs that are 'girly', (sorry to use the term) but she seems very plugged in to the NY very-very indie music scene (ie live footage from a concert of someone that's awesome, who doesn't have a record), she scours myspace for songs and the MP3's are free, and they're free, and they're free.

of my current rotation of songs, most are from you ain't no picasso (hence the matisse painting that kicks off this post).

If it's a daily dose of basketball reading you need, even in the summer, when other outlets let you down, go and bookmark the links, here. (and also note that the banner was done by the aforementioned sweet lou, at www.louiscohen.ca). the links is really well read, by industry types and professional players, and geeks like me.

well, it's 3 o'clock, my day at work is done, so I'll leave you with this mobius strip —ENJOY!

what you make it

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1142722231554

How to spot a baby conservative
KID POLITICS Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. Future liberals, on the other hand ...
Mar. 19, 2006. 10:45 AM
KURT KLEINER
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.

But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.
The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it's a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives.

Of course, if you're studying the psychology of politics, you shouldn't be surprised to get a political reaction. Similar work by John T. Jost of Stanford and colleagues in 2003 drew a political backlash. The researchers reviewed 44 years worth of studies into the psychology of conservatism, and concluded that people who are dogmatic, fearful, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and who crave order and structure are more likely to gravitate to conservatism. Critics branded it the "conservatives are crazy" study and accused the authors of a political bias.
Jost welcomed the new study, saying it lends support to his conclusions. But Jeff Greenberg, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona who was critical of Jost's study, was less impressed.

"I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best," he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.

The results do raise some obvious questions. Are nursery school teachers in the conservative heartland cursed with classes filled with little proto-conservative whiners?

Or does an insecure little boy raised in Idaho or Alberta surrounded by conservatives turn instead to liberalism?

Or do the whiny kids grow up conservative along with the majority of their more confident peers, while only the kids with poor impulse control turn liberal?

Part of the answer is that personality is not the only factor that determines political leanings. For instance, there was a .27 correlation between being self-reliant in nursery school and being a liberal as an adult. Another way of saying it is that self-reliance predicts statistically about 7 per cent of the variance between kids who became liberal and those who became conservative. (If every self-reliant kid became a liberal and none became conservatives, it would predict 100 per cent of the variance). Seven per cent is fairly strong for social science, but it still leaves an awful lot of room for other influences, such as friends, family, education, personal experience and plain old intellect.

For conservatives whose feelings are still hurt, there is a more flattering way for them to look at the results. Even if they really did tend to be insecure complainers as kids, they might simply have recognized that the world is a scary, unfair place.

Their grown-up conclusion that the safest thing is to stick to tradition could well be the right one. As for their "rigidity," maybe that's just moral certainty.

The grown-up liberal men, on the other hand, with their introspection and recognition of complexity in the world, could be seen as self-indulgent and ineffectual.

Whether anyone's feelings are hurt or not, the work suggests that personality and emotions play a bigger role in our political leanings than we think. All of us, liberal or conservative, feel as though we've reached our political opinions by carefully weighing the evidence and exercising our best judgment. But it could be that all of that careful reasoning is just after-the-fact self-justification. What if personality forms our political outlook, with reason coming along behind, rationalizing after the fact?

It could be that whom we vote for has less to do with our judgments about tax policy or free trade or health care, and more with the personalities we've been stuck with since we were kids.

w for warming

not to get all newsy, but this is too important, if only to see that this is how it begins, and we let it happen for reasons i've already mentioned.

what else explains the apathy? this story is 6 months old, and i'm reading it again on cbs thanks to the link from www.huffingtonpost.com . arianna is pretty good about keeping on about important stories.

this one is important, not so much for the global warming aspect, but the fact that the administration is hiring lawyers from oil companies to re-write scientists' reports, and no one flinches.

contrary to a response i wrote two posts previous, i may not be in favour of capitalism if this is its ultimate result.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minutes/main1415985.shtml

CBS) As a government scientist, James Hansen is taking a risk. He says there are things the White House doesn't want you to hear but he's going to say them anyway.

Hansen is arguably the world's leading researcher on global warming. He's the head of NASA's top institute studying the climate. But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science. But he didn't hold back speaking to Pelley, telling 60 Minutes what he knows.

Asked if he believes the administration is censoring what he can say to the public, Hansen says:
"Or they're censoring whether or not I can say it. I mean, I say what I believe if I'm allowed to say it."

What James Hansen believes is that global warming is accelerating. He points to the melting arctic and to Antarctica, where new data show massive losses of ice to the sea. Is it fair to say at this point that humans control the climate? Is that possible?

"There's no doubt about that, says Hansen. "The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface." Those human changes, he says, are driven by burning fossil fuels that pump out greenhouse gases like CO2, carbon dioxide.

Hansen says his research shows that man has just 10 years to reduce greenhouse gases before global warming reaches what he calls a tipping point and becomes unstoppable. He says the White House is blocking that message. "In my more than three decades in the government I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public," says Hansen.

Restrictions like this e-mail Hansen's institute received from NASA in 2004. "… there is a new review process … ," the e-mail read. "The White House (is) now reviewing all climate related press releases," it continued. Why the scrutiny of Hansen's work? Well, his Goddard Institute for Space Studies is the source of respected but sobering research on warming. It recently announced 2005 was the warmest year on record.

Hansen started at NASA more than 30 years ago, spending nearly all that time studying the earth. How important is his work? 60 Minutes asked someone at the top, Ralph Cicerone, president of the nation’s leading institute of science, the National Academy of Sciences. "I can't think of anybody who I would say is better than Hansen. You might argue that there's two or three others as good, but nobody better," says Cicerone.

And Cicerone, who’s an atmospheric chemist, said the same thing every leading scientist told 60 Minutes. "Climate change is really happening," says Cicerone. Asked what is causing the changes, Cicernone says it's greenhouse gases: "Carbon dioxide and methane, and chlorofluorocarbons and a couple of others, which are all — the increases in their concentrations in the air are due to human activities. It's that simple."

But if it is that simple, why do some climate science reports look like they have been heavily edited at the White House? With science labeled "not sufficiently reliable." It’s a tone of scientific uncertainty the president set in his first months in office after he pulled out of a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "We do not know how much our climate could, or will change in the future," President Bush said in 2001, speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House. "We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it."

Annoyed by the ambiguity, Hansen went public a year and a half ago, saying this about the Bush administration in a talk at the University of Iowa: "I find a willingness to listen only to those portions of scientific results that fit predetermined inflexible positions. This, I believe, is a recipe for environmental disaster." Since then, NASA has been keeping an eye on Hansen. NASA let Pelley sit down with him but only with a NASA representative taping the interview. Other interviews have been denied.

"I object to the fact that I’m not able to freely communicate via the media," says Hansen. "National Public Radio wanted to interview me and they were told they would need to interview someone at NASA headquarters and the comment was made that they didn’t want Jim Hansen going on the most liberal media in America. So I don’t think that kind of decision should be made on that kind of basis. I think we should be able to communicate the science."

Politically, Hansen calls himself an independent and he’s had trouble with both parties. He says, from time to time, the Clinton administration wanted to hear warming was worse that it was. But Hansen refused to spin the science that way. "Should we be simply doing our science and reporting it rigorously, or to what degree the administration in power has the right to assume that you should be a spokesman for the administration?" asks Hansen. "I've tried to be a straight scientist doing the science and reporting it as best I can."

Dozens of federal agencies report science but much of it is edited at the White House before it is sent to Congress and the public. It appears climate science is edited with a heavy hand. Drafts of climate reports were co-written by Rick Piltz for the federal Climate Change Science Program. But Piltz says his work was edited by the White House to make global warming seem less threatening. "The strategy of people with a political agenda to avoid this issue is to say there is so much to study way upstream here that we can’t even being to discuss impacts and response strategies," says Piltz. "There’s too much uncertainty. It's not the climate scientists that are saying that, its lawyers and politicians." Piltz worked under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Each year, he helped write a report to Congress called "Our Changing Planet." Piltz says he is responsible for editing the report and sending a review draft to the White House. Asked what happens, Piltz says: "It comes back with a large number of edits, handwritten on the hard copy by the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality."

Asked who the chief of staff is, Piltz says, "Phil Cooney." Piltz says Cooney is not a scientist. "He's a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, (bold is mine, F) before going into the White House," he says.

Cooney, the former oil industry lobbyist, became chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Piltz says Cooney edited climate reports in his own hand. In one report, a line that said earth is undergoing rapid change becomes “may be undergoing change.” “Uncertainty” becomes “significant remaining uncertainty.” One line that says energy production contributes to warming was just crossed out. "He was obviously passing it through a political screen," says Piltz. "He would put in the word potential or may or weaken or delete text that had to do with the likely consequence of climate change, pump up uncertainty language throughout."

In a report, Piltz says Cooney added this line “… the uncertainties remain so great as to preclude meaningfully informed decision making. …” References to human health are marked out.

Piltz says there wasn’t room at the White House for those who disagreed, so he resigned. "Even to raise issues internally is immediately career limiting," says Piltz. "That’s why you will find not too many people in the federal agencies who will speak freely about all the things they know, unless they’re retired or unless they’re ready to resign."

Jim Hansen isn't retiring or resigning because he believes earth is nearing a point of no return. He urged 60 Minutes to look north to the arctic, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the rest of the world. When 60 Minutes visited Greenland this past August, we saw for ourselves the accelerating melt of the largest ice sheet in the north. "Here in Greenland about 15 years ago the ice sheet extended to right about where I'm standing now, but today, its back there, between those two hills in the shaded area. Glaciologists call this a melt stream but, these days, its a more like a melt river," Pelley said, standing at the edge of Greenland's ice sheet.

The Bush administration doesn’t deny global warming or that man plays a role. The administration is spending billions of dollars on climate research. Hansen gives the White House credit for research but says what’s urgent now is action.

"We have to, in the next 10 years, get off this exponential curve and begin to decrease the rate of growth of CO2 emissions," Hansen explains. "And then flatten it out. And before we get to the middle of the century, we’ve got to be on a declining curve. "If that doesn't happen in 10 years, then I don’t think we can keep global warming under one degree Celsius and that means we’re going to, that there’s a great danger of passing some of these tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can’t tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can’t build a wall around the ice sheets. It will be a situation that is out of our control."

But that's not a situation you'll find in one federal report submitted for review. Government scientists wanted to tell you about the ice sheets, but before a draft of the report left the White House, the paragraph on glacial melt and flooding was crossed out and this was added: "straying from research strategy into speculative findings and musings here."

Hansen says his words were edited once during a presentation when a top official scolded him for using the word danger.

"I think we know a lot more about the tipping points," says Hansen. "I think we know about the dangers of even a moderate degree of additional global warming about the potential effects in the arctic about the potential effects on the ice sheets."

"You just used that word again that you’re not supposed to use — danger," Pelley remarks.

"Yeah. It’s a danger," Hansen says.

For months, 60 Minutes had been trying to talk with the president’s science advisor. 60 Minutes was finally told he would never be available. Phil Cooney, the editor at the Council on Environmental Quality didn’t return 60 Minutes' calls. In June, he left the White House and went to work for Exxon Mobil.

the difference is indifference

A building outside the boardroom of my office in Toronto designed by Mies van de rohe. this is the view from where i work.



a real building in prague designed by toronto born gehry. inspired by ginger and astaire dancing. love it.

a building at MIT designed by gehry.

another office shot from the boardroom of my building.

office workers like to drink booze on st. patrick's day. an excuse to drink? or a slap in the face to both irish culture, and catholicism?

i'm going with the excuse to drink after a week of making a fortune. considering that they started drinking bailey's at 7am, switched to beer at noon, and i left at three.. well, i hope none of you bought a million or two dollars worth of stock yesterday. actually, i hope most of you could afford to do so.

i have two shirts that i wear on 'casual friday'. yesterday, the shirt i wore had a hint of green in it. someone pointed out to me that i was 'in the spirit'. i didn't realize at first, until i realized that they were all wearing green. i guess that's what you do. they were really into it. the younger ones were going to stand in lines at bars after work. i didn't think there would be lines at bars after work. they are optimists, and i love them for it.

although a brit walked into the room and he wasn't wearing green so someone asked him why he wasn't, and he said "why would i? that would be like celebrating the american war of independence in britain", we lost that war too.

i wanted to point out it's a) the celebration of a man who was born a brit, but enslaved by other brits and sold to ireland 1600 years ago, but technically still a brit and b) a general not-really-anything-to-do-with-ireland excuse to get drunk (see above). dick.

so in his honour, i'm going to go watch v for vendetta today. go guy fawkes, go!

i also thought it was strange that he said "lost that one too" in reference to ireland, but i chalked it up to him getting drunk to slap catholicism on the ass and ireland in the face (see above).

stuck in the middle with you

our culture is dominated by the middle class.

the zeitgeist: The spirit of the time; the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation

those most plugged into the culture, those who consume it via television, cinema, the internet and popular music, are also driving that culture. they grow up to create it, and then regurgitate their empty desires for their young, who are starving for meaning, for archetypes, for heroes and villains, to partake in the sharing of stories that connect us to each other.

but somewhere that story went/is going terribly awry. what we're left with is drivel. this weeks top 10 tv shows is slightly more depressing.

the meaning has been stripped out. culture is dead. the postmodern movement just a desire to explain why there was no meaning, to infuse a meaningful narrative into life, but not knowing what was meaningful, or not wanting to know. easy consumerism was better. making fun of people is easier than looking at yourself. celebrity and sex culture is more instant. laziness wins. is justified.

an aside: The First episode of 'Joanie Loves Chachi' (a Happy Days spinoff) was the highest rated American TV program on Korean television. Why?? 'Chachi' is Korean for penis.

so we've created a culture defined by those in the middle class, FOR those in the middle class. the problems with the middle class are legion. but my problem with the middle class (besides them being legion... of doom) is that they are incredibly stupid. and their stupidity is polluting the zeitgeist. (to anyone who has read salman rushdie's "haroun and the sea of stories", the sea of stories, the narrative we choose to hear, is sick)

today, it seems that the cultural now-ness of the world is dominated by celebrity culture, of which reality television is an inverted-backwards created element. there are offshoots to celebrity culture showing up as well, but the real focus of all of it seems to be on the 'ME'. which brings 'me' to ---

Schadenfreude: Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

i believe that the middle class are aware of, not their privelidge exactly, but of their opportunity to do/be anything. incredible personal potential. the world at their feet. prosperity and comfort for so many, opportunity to explore yourself, to take time. no need to be married with children at 17. Go figure yourself out first. Know thyself.

but coupling this incredible opportunity with laziness and a sense of entitlement has crippled their sense of reality, as they are unable to justify lazy ineffectiveness with an opportunity they know is theirs to claim. What happens is deformity. Unable to look inward, the self projects outwards. Ugly. Grotesque. Sick.

television, celebrity, movie, magazine, gossip, advertisements, ipod as accessory, television on your phone (how else would I know how to dress??), and an entire cadre of movie cult heroes whom to belittle and insult in an effort to elevate the damaged psyche. I'm not talking about me or you as a few people, but a collective sadness belonging to those who dwell in and long for:

mediocrity: n 1: ordinariness as a consequence of being average and not outstanding

the dictionary has a definition, but not a response to that definition. What do we, as a group, feel about our inherent inability to really achieve anything? Our society moves so slowly, meaning that we cannot just up and change it today. It takes time. time many don't want to spend on the chance that nothing happens:

the cure for AIDS takes a backseat to the cure for baldness.

war is fought for, because it makes more money than peace.

monsanto wants to OWN ALL basmati rice. including ANY I could grow in my yard.

Newfoundland has no fish.

gays can't get married (in many places).

we STILL use the internal combustion engine. we still use petroleum.

53% of americans think the earth was created JUST like how it says in the bible.

the intelligentia are ignored and ridiculed, liberalism a dirty word. the smartest people in the world are labelled and dismissed.

students are encouraged to snitch on their teachers.

we can't swim in our lakes, or eat fish from them. (aside 1.5: the loch ness monster myth is solved)

the most powerful nation on earth is dying, choking on its own ignorance, an ignorance it cultivated for itself.

an aside 2: Out of the top 50 all-time-top-rated television shows, number that are Super Bowls: 18.

and so, I believe, people shut down. they turn off. the only way they know they can make a difference is to bunker down and plan for the future - they'll have children. their children will change the world, or live up to their potential, a potential they're willing to spend the rest of their life working to assure them of. and so the cycle repeats itself. and the lazy and entitled do nothing but shop for new toys and get jobs that enable them to buy new toys and so on. the massive cultural effect of millions and millions of people just settling, just rolling over, the effect of this, on a culture, on the psyche of a culture, must be terrible. bitterness. jealousy. pettiness. a nation, nations, of people, the majority of whom have given up, have shame or guilt about their lot, have left dreams and chosen nothing, THIS results in a polluted culture.

our narrative takes on the shape that is willed by the powerful middle. through sheer numbers the stories they want to see and tell dominate the culture. and so we become defined, through history, by this seething sobbing mass. the zeitgeist is theirs to define.

an aside 3: Percentage of U.S. women born blonde: 16. Percentage of women who are blonde today: 33. Percentage of TV newscasters who are blonde: 64. Percentage of Miss Americas who are blonde: 65. (I'm getting this stat from a website, but I like the progression - the next stat would be 'percentage of porn stars who are blonde', and a similarly increasing number (probably 99.9%). this means that newscasting women also have a 64% of being a pornstar. )


and as the cycle of regurgitation continues, the content gets watered down. even a CD breaks down over time. a regurgitation of a regurgitation, a memory of a myth of memory. and the stories we have left to tell ourselves are subverted. perverted. its for advertising. to sell you something you don't even need. but the patch is ripe for perversion, the culture wanting it. craving it.

instead of a story told for its own sake, the story now comes with strings attached.

and after a while our culture came to understand that there were strings attached. and so we saw the elephant in the room.

and instead of kicking it out, we embraced it. said that money for its own sake was good. that advertising to our greatest weaknesses was fine by us, as long as it had a funny show in between it, it could make us feel as insecure as possible. as dumb, ugly, smelly, as it could. as big a loser in life (hello tony robbins), or a big loser in the kitchen (hello wok with yan), there was a way to make us feel terrible for profit.

advertising, the science. it's not just a business anymore, it's calculated to destroy you. and we welcome it in. because we embraced the emptiness of money, the reason for money. we said it's okay to be wrong, as long as you're rich.

it's okay to be an asshole, as long as you did it for the bottom line.

it's okay to kill people, to destroy the planet, to lie, lie, as long as you are doing it to make money. your country, your friends, your family, and your neighbors, they would all understand, on the inside, would do the same thing if given the chance.

oh publicly they'd tear you limb from limb, denounce you and your gene pool. but they all understood, because they've read the same narratives, saw the same stories, wanted the same things, grew up in a town just like yours, with parents just like yours, who wanted the same things your parents wanted, went to schools like yours, for reasons like yours.

the narrative is fractured. on the one hand we are moral, or say we are. Our laws say we are, at least.

on the other hand, we have created corporations and instituation that allow us to turn a blind eye to the failure of our culture to transcend itself, to rise up, indeed, we now welcome the other side of morality, all for the "greater good", the economy, the national debt, the housing starts, the numbers that mean nothing to most, but justify everything.

the middle class are driving a car made for by the wealthy, straight towards a pack of the poor. that's the way it goes, and will go. we are on a ride we will not get off (and i say "will" instead of "can", because like the little engine that could, we can).

because of mediocrity. because the middle class can change, and therefore that's enough. to know we could if we wanted to. we have the power, the collective wealth, the intelligence and the opportunity. but it's squandered because we're fat enough. happy... enough. can turn our eye from homelessness and say "but what can I do?", can turn our eye from the destruction of the planet, from corruption in all world leaders, not because we can't 'fix' it, but because clearly we don't want to. clearly, we're content to fail. we've been brought up on failure. the parents of the middle class, the founding fathers, failed by aspiring to the middle.

and passing it down the line as tradition.

The Profit Takers

So the Royal Bank posted its biggest profits ever this past quarter, of 1.3 billion.

that's 1,300,000,000 in 3 months... in profit. PROFIT.

the good news? royal bank is a public company, so buy some shares and get in on the madness!

the bad news?

companies like this control the market, and the people running these companies control the government.

let's back up a minute, briefly, to think about mortgage rates:

the price of homes is tied to the price of money (interest rates), so the cheaper it is for someone to rent money, the more of their money they are able to pay for a home.

someone is willing to pay $1500/month for a mortgage. at 5% (these figures are not exact, but bear with for illustration) they can buy a $300,000 home for $1500 a month.

at 10% interest rates, their $1500 a month will buy them a house worth only $240,000. the amount the buyer is willing to spend remains the same, per month, but the amont that it gets them in the long run changes. so the interest rates determine the price of a home, because people are always willing to spend X% of their income on buying a house.

if a house is worth $300,000 when the interest rates are 5%, there's a good chance that that house will be worth $265,000 if the rates spiked to 10%, because the amount someone like me would be able to afford would fall (relative to the 5%). unfortunately, the guy in the house with the mortgage for $300,000 is now sitting on a home worth $265,000.

the problem with interest rates right now is that they are trending higher, and so people that could afford their mortage when it was $1500 a month will be paying $2000 a month when they renogiate their mortgage on a house that's worth $35,000 less.

invariably, people will sell their houses as they will be unable to afford the payments. with a glut of houses on the market, and high interest rates, this will exert downward pressure on home prices even further, meaning that people will be forced to stay in a house that is worth considerably less than what they paid for it because they are tied into a mortgage that they have to pay off in cash, not in the equity of the home.

the banks lent you the money at 5%, but are now charging you 10%, because that's the price the bank of canada has set their lending rate to the banks at. nice deal for the banks. suck you in at 5, stick it to you at 10% (my parents were paying 21% during the recession of the early 90's)

when the interest rates get higher, people selling their homes end up owing money to the bank after they sell (ie - the house sold for 265,000, but they still owed 285,000 on the mortgage after 4 years).

supposedly, there is a strong chance that this day is approaching.

when those who control the market decide to engage in 'profit taking' (as it's called), they will begin to divest themselves of much of their excess property. when they all jump out of the market, and they will, there will be a massive amount of money (their profit) flowing into other sources while they wait on the collapse (ie - recession).

this place is often the bond market, a safe and simple way to earn a few percent on your dough. the economic indicators are leaning towards a recession because the money flow is moving towards these safe bonds --- those in the know, the profit takers, are getting out of the markets.

that's the idea.

doom and gloom.

if i were a businessman i'd offer you discounts on tickets to newfoundland, the land of the great oil and crab boom. perhaps sell you on a new burgeoning business idea someone had of grabbing those icebergs that float by to bottle and sell the water - no more wasted icebergs drifting down south to be harvested. if there's going to be global warming, let's get in on it.

but i'm not a businessman. i'm a guy who edits things that business people write. and what they have been writing about lately has been depressing.

record profits!
maybe a recession!

the other day the guy in the office beside me was overheard saying to an old college pal on the phone: "remember back in the day when we were making what, like, 100 grand". i nearly choked on my coffee. but i decided to choke on his, so i ran into his office and grabbed it and then choked on it. felt much better. if there's going to be profit taking, there's got to be some plain old 'taking'. that's where i come in.

i promise this will be my only work oriented post. you think this is dull? yeah. feel my pain!

120 in a week

thanks boyos and girlos (?) for coming to the site. i'll try to give you something to look at other than that literal photograph.

soon.


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