Every era has it's Malthusian alarmists and without fail, each has been proven wrong by exactly the same thing the author decries and says won't work this time: technological change and adaption. There's no reason to think this time will be any different. Will some places become uninsurable? Sure, plenty of places over time have become uninsurable. Will the whole world became uninsurable? Absolutely not, because we are quite good at adaptation in the face of adversity.
The issue in California is not the price of insurance, it's availability because of extremely myopic ballot initiatives that are entirely political in nature. Should insurance be fairly priced, then the market can force people out of uninsurable areas and into areas with far less chance to burn.
Thinking technology will always save us is no different from divine or magical thinking.
Lots of societies and civilizations have collapsed. Some were straight up wiped off the earth and we don't even know what happened to them. Western civilization has had a good 500 years, and America has had a good 250 years, but that doesn't mean things can never go bad in the future.
Plenty of places have had catastrophic droughts, famines, and plagues. Nearly half of Europe died a few times from plagues. Most natives in America were absolutely wiped out from disease and other issues. Tens of millions died of famine in China last century. Tsunamis washed away and killed hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Japan this current century.
In the past, the Krakatoa eruption messed with the climate around the world and made the sky dark. The Bronze Age Collapse is something we still don't understand but nearly wiped out everything in the western world. With population density higher than ever, disasters that match major historical ones would be far more destructive. It's really just been an unusually peaceful few decades in first world countries and people have gotten too comfortable.
>Plenty of places have had catastrophic droughts, famines, and plagues. Nearly half of Europe died a few times from plagues. Most natives in America were absolutely wiped out from disease and other issues. Tens of millions died of famine in China last century. Tsunamis washed away and killed hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Japan this current century.
Conveniently you selected pre-technology examples. How curious.
Meanwhile the impending global famine(s) - (plural) of the 20th century never came to be because captitalism kept pumping out agriscience improvements to improve crop yields to 10 times what they were in 1900.
Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. What are you defining as "technology"? Software as a service chatbots? Because those aren't saving anyone.
And 227000 people died 20 years ago in a tsunami in Indonesia. They had cell phones and the internet. Is that pre-technology? 50 million died in famines in China in the 1950s. They had TV, radio, and computers. Is that pre-technology?
Technology is just tools that humans make to solve a problem.[1] It's not magic. And in the case of the Japanese tsunami, the most basic technology that humans have had for tens of thousands of years saved countless lives: just building a wall, and making it tall enough to block rising water. [2] But wrapping an entire country in walls is kind of unfeasible. And you can't protect the entire world. We never know what kind of disaster will strike next, and technology to protect us only develops after we suffer the consequences at least once.
> Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years
Vernacular methods of doing things have been around - without science or rapid innovation. Key point in time was invention of printing press combined with lutheran zeal to read and the western alphabet that allowed unprecedented platform for knowledge transfer. After that it's been pure acceleration.
Before literacy was a major thing (which it has not been historically) knowledge transfer and preservation was based on human to human contact. You could not literally just crank the machine to print out out going edges in a knowledge graph.
I'm not meaning just a few literate people. I mean an entire society capable of reading and eager to create and learn new information.
> Technology is just tools that humans make to solve a problem.
According to a dictionary it's "the branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences" / "the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry" and I would argue it's this sort of technology that enables novel, rapid adaptation.
Applied sciences need science before application. Now - knowledge seeking that sure looks likes science even though it was not called that has been around few millenia - Thales of Miletus, Ibn al-Haytham etc etc.
What is novel in our time is application of science to every goddamn problem on an industrial scale. And the understanding that things can improve. This requires a literate society (imo but arguable maybe), eager to adapt, and pragmatic recognition of what works and what does not.
There are areas that are lacking in literacy and capital. While people in those areas sure enough are able as anybody else to individually use technology developed and manufactured elsewhere, the societies in which they live simply lack the means to apply industrial level technological innovations.
With industrial level technology adaptation it's a whole different ballgame.
Many places in US would be uninhabitable without technology and are thus testaments to the idea that MODERN technology allows survival in unprecedented places. For example Colorado. The place was so arid and unhospitable no one could or would want to live there. But then there came railroads, industrial engineering to implement water reservoirs etc etc and visit Denver today and it's very hard for an outsider to realize they are visiting a modern goddamn miracle.
I'm fairly sure if people can live in Colorado they can live anywhere given sufficient capital is applied (capital being the enabler of applied science and technology).
A lot of ancient societies rapidly adapted to problems. In my previously mentioned tsunami example, ancient societies would build their towns above a certain point to be safe from them. Some cultures used to (and some poorer people still do) build houses on stilts near flood areas to stay safe from rising water.
But in modern, literate society, people think "nah it'll be fine bro" and build houses right up on and flat against the coastline. Then entire towns get washed away.
The biggest mistake modern people make is assuming ancient societies were stupid. They didn't have people sitting in offices thinking up solutions to problems. But the reality is those societies learned just as quickly as anyone else did, and a lot of them probably had a much stronger fear of nature and didn't sit around thinking "nah bro we'll totally survive. we have technology". They knew a tiny mistake meant death. Death to modern first worlders seems like a very out of reach thing. We operate on the assumption we'll live long lives and die in a retirement home.
And Colorado isn't by any means inhospitable. There were plenty of tribes in Colorado before literate enlightened megagenius westerners came along to save the day. It has some of the oldest known towns on the North American continent.[1] Westerners may have at first struggled to survive there with their modern technology, but natives lived just fine in Colorado for thousands of years.
Tibet is a far more inhospitable place. So is Saudi Arabia. But those also have thousands of years of history all without a printing press. Arabian culture even managed to spread across the world out from the inhospitable desert and even dominate part of Europe before the printing press existed. Spain and Indonesia became Islamic before enlightened Europeans went out to save the world and make it "habitable".
I agree humans as individuals regadless where they came from or when they lived have always been equally precious in potential, and all traditions are valuable, but it’s simply false narrative to claim modern technology & capital would not make a difference.
My point was it’s false narrative to compare any historical society to a modern industrial one.
Printing press, latin alphabet and market economy were suberb for knowledge transfer. There was no historically comparable system to commodotize and scale literacy.
It’s false narrative to claim european developments were not unique and transformative. That’s just how the history goes. Literacy, capital, binding contract law and science created a heady mix that created a system that now is global standard how societies try to operate.
Large parts of the system came from other parts of the world. The point is not where this happened or by whom, but the point is it happened.
Modern technological societies are able to adapt in unprecedented scale. Regardless of culture or ethnicity.
It would be pretty weird to think this would be a narrative of european supremacy - cultural, racial or otherwise. Europe was an inconsequential periphery and it’s once again an iconsequential periphery.
Japan had literacy rates equal to the west during the age of exploration. [1] And when you go back to historical records, Egypt and Mesopotamia had insane good record keeping and were stabler, longer lasting societies than anything else earth has yet seen. They're also in some notably harsh environments compared to the easy living of Europe.
Latin characters really had nothing to do with it. Western society was built off the lessons learned from those two societies. What separates post-printing press western civilization has been the incredibly rapid expansion (which Mongols also achieved with nothing but horses and bows and arrows). But whether this post-printing press civilization will last as long as Ancient Egypt did (3000 years) is yet to be seen. We've got about 2600 years to go.
I would argue that Egypt apart from temperature was lot less harsh than Europe. Nile offers water all through the year. And the flooding brought fertilizer each year. Also lot less risk of any type of weather causing famine.
In reality that is lot less harsh than Europe before industrial agriculture. Just looking at list of famines shows that Europe was a harsh place to live for stable society.
It's also very hard to compare pharaonic Egypt to a modern society since most people were agricultural labourers. You did have not that many people (lets say 3M which was a lot by ancient standards), and of the elite who actually could use capital and talent were really, really scarce. Literacy rates were maybe 1%-15%?
Think what a modern country would look like with 3M people of which 150K can read. It would not be pretty and Egypt was probably worse. Of course if you can control thousands of people you always have some capabilities which is the reason why we adore their art to this day. But I think one should think "North Korea" what pharaonic egypt likely was like rather than "pinnacle of imaginable civilization". This is not to put down the achievements of the egyptian civilization, but like pointed out, they had lots of time.
Most people anywhere (except the pastoralists ofc) were agricultural labourers before modern farming kicked in.
What makes the capabilities of the current civilization different is a combination of things, some of which are unique this time around.
The major differentiators are
1. Global scale monoculture in knowledge (take engineers from US midwest, Ethiopia, China, Brazil, France, Japan, Finland, Chennai - we all basically can mesh instantly to a product team since tehcnological education is so homogenous). This monoculture was enabled by the printing press and later digital technologies.
2. Insane amount of energy per capita available
3. Amount of capital available including finance
2. and 3. simply were not available before. We can argue all day about merits of education systems of old but you simply did not have this global talent mass on hand. This talent mass is prerequisite so that you can scale capital and technology rapidly on a global scale.
Energy&Capital then feed the machine to give it energy. This machine simply did not exist before. The energy per person in any society was tiny fraction what we can utilize. Similarly for capital.
Japan is excellent example.
a) It demonstrates how long it takes for a society, if it's educated and all around excellent but pre-modern to reach parity with modern societies. I would argue based on facts it's about two generations or 50 years (for Japan) from Perry expedition 1850's to Japan wiping a western industrial nation state fleet to the bottom of the Tsushima straits (1905).
b) It demonstrates this society, when in it's pre-modern configuration lacked things, that it felt necesary to acquire to be able to go head-to-head with societies that had these implemented.
It's this difference between pre-modern,pre-capitalist pre-industrial and modern I'm talking about, why it's false narrative to state "people througout history have been smart and able" as a contradiction why modern societies would be more capable. Because they are. It's not a statement about why some people with different upbringing or genes would be different. That's irrelevant (except up to a point where their upbringing relates to prevalent institutions i.e Acemoglu, "Why nations fail" etc).
I agree we know nothing of how long the current system can last, or will it evolve or devolve. But it's very hard for me to imagine the system going away unless we go full mad max. Because it's not about cultural identity anymore. Who is your king or god. While we live in tumultuous times, Fukuyama was still more or less correct IMO, even though clearly it's not a "end of history" as much as "beginning of new history".
It's about capital, energy, education and markets.
Technology can't save you from famines when there isn't enough sunlight to grow crops for a season or two. One good supervolcano and civilization might collapse or at least take such a hit as to be utterly transformed. Billions dead, etc.
You think it's possible to put any decent percentage of our GLOBAL food production in greenhouses (remember with less light global temperatures go down) within ~6 months?
Billions would perish. If the luckier rich countries did not get nuked or invaded by armies or waves of endless starving refugees then they would be able to save a good amount of their population. At best world development goes back ~50-100 years. At worst, modern civilization basically ends from the combination of conflict and famine.
that doesn’t address the context of the response at all.
is technology helping, or hurting in that situation?
near as i can tell, it is the only thing that could help.
we aso have significant food stores and buffers, and if it was the situation you described it would literally be a ‘drop everything and get working’ emergency. we’d likely do better than you expect.
Sure I do. Do you have anything else you can propose that would help at all?
And if a couple billion people (minimum) would be dead if we didn’t do it ASAP, do you think that energy or material wouldn’t be expended at the drop of a hat?
Hell, look at how much energy we expend just to serve cat videos.
People generally respond to sudden, external, visible risks pretty well.
It’s when risks are hidden, build slowly, or are caused by behaviors they consider ‘unsolvable’ and they’ve learned to adapt to that they suck.
Serving cat videos is about at least three orders of magnitude less energy than required to grow food. How much energy do you think you need to light half a hectare with 1 kWh LED lamps?
But let’s say we take the upper end of energy consumption multiples between input energy and output energy (kcal), say 120 times. So to feed 1 person 2000 kcal per day, would require 240,000 kcal worth of ‘production’ energy, which at that multiple would add up to 278 kWh per day per person. Signifiant!
Multiply that by the population of the US (345 million), and that is a lot of kWh for sure - 95910000000 kWh. But it looks like national energy usage is measured in ‘quads’. And that is .3 quads per day.
Current US energy production is approximately 100 quads per year, and consumption a bit less than that at around 90 something.
So if we picked the absolute least efficient most energy consuming plants, and grew them in the least efficient type of growing environment, we’d need to drop everything and devote all our energy production to it.
Assuming no rationing, no efficiency improvements (LED lights are quite efficient now, and if we really had this issue we’d of course devote 100% of available production to them!), and no bulk commercial production of simpler foodstuffs (we can make bulk sugars and proteins via bioreactors right now, for instance), it would be terrible but possible. At least for the US.
Countries with more solar production, or colder, would be harder hit of course.
China would be well positioned probably to pivot, and I’d be surprised if they didn’t use it to their advantage. Especially with turning up their nukes and pivoting all their solar plants to making LEDs instead.
India and Bangladesh would be really screwed though.
Everyone would finally think farming was cool again though, so that’s a plus.
I take it you never bought LED panels for indoor grow ops right? Never considered the cost and resources required for the wiring, installation, programming, making greenhouses in the span of a year? Do you know how much copper you need per capita? The bottlenecks in manufacturing? This is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.
I have to say that this thread is very frustrating to read. I see @lazide is engaging with you in good faith and providing high effort, thoughtful answers. There's a lot of statistics and factors involved in a discussion like this. So I won't say @lazide's analysis is correct or flawed. But this is a good topic where a good discussion can be had and @lazide is holding up their end of the bargain.
But every response of yours is dismissive. And this makes this thread frustrating to read. You answer every reply with more questions and a tone of dismissal. If you know so much about this area, why don't you begin sharing some facts and enlighten us? Dismissing your co-commenter and answering their replies with more questions is not educating anyone of anything!
It would help if instead of answering a comment with questions, you share what you know. So how much is the cost of wiring, installation, programming and making greenhouses in the span of a year? How much copper is needed per capita? What do you know? Tell us!
> It would help if instead of answering a comment with questions, you share what you know. So how much is the cost of wiring, installation, programming and making greenhouses in the span of a year? How much copper is needed per capita? What do you know? Tell us!basic led grow lights for agriculture
[Trivial googling shows you $750K to $1.25 million Euros per hectare](https://www.floraldaily.com/article/9574650/half-fewer-order...). At 400 square meters of greenhouse to feed a single human being (a reasonable estimate, lower bound being 300 under super intensive conditions with experienced growers), that's at least $30K _per person_ under the existing constraints of the industry just for an industry-standard greenhouse. You could of course lower construction costs and do the bare minimum, at the cost of a dramatic decrease in yield.
That of course assumes materials and fabrication is abundantly available and wouldn't see an impossibly high rise in materials and service costs if suddenly the entire world were to demand greenhouse construction with the attending demands in electricity distribution, power generation, and the sudden need to turn most of society into a sort of high-tech agrarian population, something that just doesn't happen in a year.
So you’re saying that if everyone would flat out starve to death, they would not, or could not, spend that amount of time/money/energy to not starve to death?
I’m not saying it would be pretty, or that people wouldn’t die.
I’m just saying that actually doesn’t sound impossible.
Far more effort than that was expended per person in WW2, and that wasn’t nearly as severe of an existential threat.
Hell, in this case it would be an obvious/visible, sudden, external, non-human existential threat, so would be ideal for uniting humanity on somewhat common grounds.
I doubt there is any point in debating a complex topic with someone whose only responses are dismissive questions and "5 minutes of Googling"! I appreciate your thoughtful comments in this thread though!
If this is how you get your information, I doubt what you say can be taken seriously. Not to mention that the reference you quote seems like a random website nobody has ever heard of!
This was a very interesting topic and a serious discussion about this topic would at least include references to bonafide surveys or well established trustworthy sources. To find them takes much more than 5 minutes of Googling. Unfortunately I don't have the time to do that, so I requested that if you know something, you share it here with us.
Clearly you do not have the time to do your research either since all you have to present us is "5 minutes of Googling" that turns up a random source!
The Green Revolution has so far just postponed famines. We are farming in an unsustainable way. We're running out of fertile topsoil and are depleting fossil aquifers in many regions of the world. Inorganic fertilizers might become scarce in the foreseeable future too.
One thing worth noting about these agriscience improvements you're touting would be they require a combination of non-renewable inputs and unsustainable amounts of water. There is also the minor issue of unrecoverable topsoil depletion and the steady decline of nutrients in agricultural products tracked over decades. Kicking the can down the road isn't the same as solving the problem.
> "we are quite good at adaptation in the face of adversity."
Historically, much of this "adaptation" was achieved via migration. If your vision for the future includes mass migration away from the equator into the cooler north, then okay, we are on the same page as to one of the plausible outcomes.
This is the same logic that almost destroyed the financial system in 2008. "House prices always go up, and there is no reason to think this time will be different". Fine logic that works until it doesn't.
At best your logic works because people get concerned, and work to solve the problem. Once there is a critical mass of people unconcerned, like yourself, that think we will magically adapt and solve the problem, we're screwed.
? Have you opened a history book? The whole pre-WW2 situation was a malthusian trap. The colonial empires starved out whole continents on the periphery of their empires. Thats how japan and germany turned to hyper-imperialism in the first place.
And the solution of turning gas into fertilizer requires a free trade system to be reliable.
But important, useful things will still be burning and flooding, at huge cost to the economy. Which is less nice.
At this point I think we've tipped into a world of complete delusion, where imaginary "markets" are more important than keeping the planet comfortable, stable, and inhabitable.
Also. this, from that most volatile, irrational, and least sensible of all professions - the actuaries:
You can't live in places where your home is going to get destroyed every couple of decades by wildfires, floods, or hurricanes. There are more of these places now because of climate change and a lot of people are going to have to migrate over the next century, like huge global migrations. Insurance can't/won't allow a bunch of people to deny this reality any more (or at least much longer). LA is going to be pretty uninsurable unless the local governments do a lot to mitigate the fire risk.
As the 173 million strong population of Bangladesh can attest, they can and do live in such places.
"Each year, on average, 31,000 square kilometres (12,000 sq mi) (around 21% of the country) is flooded. During severe floods the affected area may exceed two-thirds of the country, as was seen in 1998."
Most of the world does not want to aspire to be Bangladesh, but humans have been living in extremely disaster-prone areas for millennia because the short-term benefits (rich soil etc) outweigh the occasional catastrophic losses.
Another example: Japan has many quakes per year and has a strangely high percentage of the world's active volcanos. People have lived there for a very long time, built to accommodate it (both traditionally, using timber and expecting to rebuild often, or with modern earthquake-hardened architecture), and is now a top five economy by GDP.
And, well, most of the US is just a hanger-on to California's economy.
> In 2023, California's gross domestic product (GDP) was about $3.9 trillion, comprising 14% of national GDP ($27.7 trillion). Texas and New York are the next largest state economies, at 9% and 8%, respectively.[1]
CA is a huge economy but by no means is the US just CA + 49 other states. Might be fairer to say it’s CA+NY+TX+FL but at that point you’re just aggregating the population.
The cost of labor is extremely high in the US compared to Bangladesh, and that along with building standards, minimum lot size, minimum floor space requirements and required low density zoning (lmao) make these two case very different
What does it mean when a whole country has expensive labour? The highly-paid people of said country can afford each others' services. It basically means "low cost of materials" from a human perspective.
Yes and before they migrate due to climate change, they'll sell their charred lots to some fascist with the willpower to clear the brush, fill the reservoirs, and deploy fire fighting drones. Then everything will go back to normal. God protects only the strong.
So is living on the sea bed. It's irrationally expensive and inconvenient, which is why we don't do it.
Living in areas in constant danger of flooding and/or burning and/or storm wind damage and/or drought seems like quite an eccentrically inconvenient lifestyle flex.
Far enough inland that the rising sea levels will keep you 50 miles away from the coast for the next century anywhere east of a north-south line that runs through the middle of Kansas. These are places where it rains so you have local water supply and you don’t have a yearly wildfire season and the risk of hurricane destruction is far lower. Also just not in the floodplain of a local river.
I can tell you home insurance is climbing in the Midwest from storms (roofs are apparently expensive to replace/service). I pay more in Nebraska than I did in California (although to be fair, I did not buy earthquake insurance in CA).
But there are currently only 8 billion people, and already a lot of articles about how people in Europe and South Korea and Japan and America aren't having children. How are we ever going to get to 1 trillion like this?
It's always amazing and disappointing to see how many people actually believe that prices can be lowered by legislative fiat, or that "price gouging" is an actual thing that happens. I guess they would prefer to have shortages instead of paying market rates, and then complain about "greedy big business" or (my favorite) "late stage capitalism".
It's interesting to see the federal government taking a strong industrial policy approach to AI through this executive order as well as physical computing via the CHIPS act.
Couple concerns:
- I loath to believe in silver bullets. The executive branch seems to believe that investing in AI (note: the order, despite the extensive definitions, leaves Artificial Intelligence undefined) is the solution to US global leadership, clean energy, national defense and better jobs. Rarely if ever is one policy a panacea for so many objectives.
- I am skeptical of government "picking the winners". Markets do best when competitive forces reward innovation. By enforcing an industrial policy on a nascent industry, the executive may just as well be stifling innovation from unlikely firms.
- I am always worried about inducing a _subsidy race_ whereby countries race to subsidize firms to gain a competitive advantage. Other countries do the same, leading to a glut of stimulus with little advantage to any country.
- Finally, government bureaucracy moves slowly (some say that's the point). What happens if a breakthrough innovation in AI radically changes our needs for the type, size or other characteristic of these data centers? Worse still, what happens if we hit another AI winter? Are we left with an enormous pork barrel project? It's hard to envision the federal government industrial policy perfectly capturing future market needs, especially in such a fast moving industry as tech.
Is the U.S. responding to recent moves in the U.K. to make a national effort in this field (the U.S. does not want to be an also-ran)? Are they responding to the efforts in China?
Do they know something more than we do with regard to the efficacy of current or soon-to-come AI? Or is it purely a speculative business/economic move?
Well, they provided something and it’s from a reputable publication. You can wait around for more people to chime in or you can dig in yourself until then.
Laypeople are much more likely to learn something useful and solid from a good podcast on a topic, run by someone (or with a guest) who has read the literature broadly and can distinguish solid papers from publish-or-perish drivel. Doing your own research, unless you dedicate an inordinate amount of time or energy to it, is very likely to lead you completely astray.
I'm a Canadian living in the states. The joke I tell my family is that I go to Canada to hear about US news. The other joke I have goes like this: the problem with Canada is that America thinks Canada is Europe, Europe thinks it's America and Canadians think they're American.
Has anglo-Canada ever been meaningfully distinct from the US ?
It is as tightly bound to the US as Puerto Rico. I can't imagine Canada adopting economic, military or cultural policies that favor US enemies without being strong-armed out of it by the US.
It is a charged question, and I mean it as a hypothetical. But countries form through common language, culture, religion, geography, interests or trauma/war. Anglo-Canada and the US have all the good things in common and no war/trauma keeping them apart.
At times, Anglo-Canadians feel more distinct from French-Canadians than they do most Americans.
Ofc, if you've been a stable nation for century+, then there's no good reason to fix what's not broken.
French-Canadians are not anything like English Canadians, except in the minds of English Canadians who don't know any better. English Canadians like to think we are one great nation, but we are in fact two great nations, deeply divided (more than that if you include indigenous peoples, which you should).
French-speaking Quebecers self-identify as follows:
- Canadians first, and Quebecois second.
- Quebecois first, and Canadian second.
- Quebecois, and not Canadian at all.
The majority of French-speaking Quebecois do not self-identify as being in the first category, and a very significant percentage identify as being in the third category, with a plurality falling into the second category. I think it's safe to say that almost all French Canadians in Quebec identify as culturally Quebecois.
I lived in Quebec during the Cultural Revolution in the 80s, and was there for the first referendum, but I left because it became clear that Montreal was a bad place to be if I wanted to raise English-speaking children. In the end, I didn't feel any great need to pay for the sins of centuries of Quebec Anglophones that weren't my ancestors.
Once you wander outside of Montreal, into the countryside, dislike of Anglophones is common to the point that it feels almost dangerous, and gets even worse the closer you get to Quebec City.
In my experience, tolerance of Anglophones in Montreal has decreased dramatically in recent years. I was in a clothing store on St. Catherine, neer Bishop Street (once the heart of Anglophone Montreal). When two American tourists came in, and asked for help, the young shopkeeper responded: "On ne parle pas Anglais ici" (one does not speak English here).
A friend of mine graduated from a high school in Westmount (home to the Anglophone elite, most pointedly hated by Francophones). He said that of his friends in high school, none had remained in Quebec, because even though all of them spoke fluent French, being Anglophones, they were not able to find jobs.
The first part of your comment was pretty spot on, but the rest I think is biased from living here in a different time, the populated areas around Montreal (Brossard, Laval especially) all have significant English-speaking-only populations. In downtown during lunch time it's pretty much 50/50 whether the fast food/cafe worker will speak French at all.
Not so much the suburbs as the countryside. I live in Ottawa these days, where you don't have to go far across the Quebec border at all before you end up in Pur Laine country.
> the young shopkeeper responded: "On ne parle pas Anglais ici" (one does not speak English here)
A point of translation nuance here: in American English “one does not speak {language} here” carries with it an overt sense of pretense or unpleasantness, whereas in French “on”/one is very commonly used as an alternative to “we” in informal conversation, and does not carry any of the same tone as using “one” does in English. While the translation is correct at a literal level, idiomatically it’d just be “we don’t speak English here”.
“On” really is more casual/conversational than “nous”–I think both the original and your versions would seem stiff or impersonal coming from a shopkeeper in English, whereas the original French would not be confrontational in its word choice alone. Admittedly my reference point is modern conversational language in France and Switzerland, though.
As a native French speaker (maybe you are too), I think GP understood the nuance you mentioned but still proposes a good translation to reflect less pressure.
(Native level two romance languages. Very poor French, but I can obviously read it with two Latin languages and 8 years of schooling)
Oh I agree that the translator understood the nuance and I agree why "we" was proposed. The translation is correct, as is the original one.
I was proposing another alternative that incorporates the cold impersonality of "on" whilst not sounding pompous. The server was being viscous, not pompous.
I don't think my translation is "correct"; it hinges on my reading that the server was rude and nasty. A reading based on living in latin countries but also one based on my English Canadian prejudice that French Canadians all speak English but resent having to (don't fault them for it either)
I find translations fascinating as a subject. While there can be a bad translation, there is never a perfect one.
I grew up in Ontario and did French immersion schooling with two of my siblings. One year our family drove across Quebec to summer with grandparents in Maine. Along the way we stopped at a McDonalds for lunch. My siblings and I excitedly ordered in French: "Puis-je avoir un hamburger?" Our orders were taken no problem. Our New England anglophone parents then went to order: "May I please have a hamburger?" "Désolé; je'n comprends pas l'Anglais," they were told. The kids ended up ordering two "amburger"s for our parents. We've been laughing about it ever since. Good on em for caring about identity I guess? The stereotype of francophone rudeness is still a running joke in our family 30 years later.
Note: there are some wonderful French Canadians out there. Just not that day at that register in that Macdonalds.
What are some more resources you would recommend to learn more about this topic? A documentary or book would be awesome (or youtube channels, blogs, etc)!
As a separatist-sympathizer, I get it.... but instead of obsessing over teaching French to English kids, you'd think they could set up programs to teach their own kids to speak French!
French Canadian is the cruelest sounding language I have ever heard.
Quebec has tried to separate twice in the past 50 years, and comes within a Brexit's margin of actually getting it done (and if it wasn't for Montreal, they'd already be gone).
The seed of that separation was, naturally, caused by a military conflict between what would become Western Canada and what used to be Upper Canada.
Canada isn't actually as stable a country as Ottawa might have you believe.
This might make you feel old, but the referendum was 30 years ago, and Black October was 55 years ago.
The whole Quebec movement is basically dead in the water now.
An entire generation of Canadians didn't exist or don't remember that.
I'd argue the GWOT, the Great Recession, and COVID have had a stronger impact on modern (2020s) Canadian politics and discourse than the Quebec Independence Movement.
>The whole Quebec movement is basically dead in the water now.
Quebec's Separatist party has complete electoral dominance (except for Montreal, but Montreal is the least Quebec part of Quebec) and has the ability to force the government's hand on most things.
If the Eastern Big City Party loses the next election as is projected (and the Bloc correspondingly loses all of its power) they'll be back.
PQ has largely transitioned away from soverignity and largely campaigns on culture war issues like Bill 21 and immigration.
Only voters who are 65+ are split on soverignity. Every other age demographic overwhelmingly supports remaining in Canada [0]
This can be seen with the CAQ, which has poached most of the PQ's leadership and campaigns almost entirely on Bill 21 and immigration [1], not on "Quebec Libre"
Are you completely out of the loop that much? The PQ is first in the polls, and has promised a referendum within a first mandate. It's a whole fucking big deal that they managed to lead in polls right now while promising that.
> PQ has largely transitioned away from soverignity[sic] and largely campaigns on culture war issues like Bill 21 and immigration.
Your initial point was not that people chose the PQ over language concerns, but that the party had transitioned. The party has done no such thing. It's doubling down on separatism if anything. It's crazy.
It isn't as homogenous a society as an outsider would think but I can assure it’s quite stable as a country.
Quebec exiting anytime soon would be annoying for the country but a tragic mistake for quebec especially in seeing how poorly it has workout for the UK which had been an economic engine. Quebec has been sputtering since the 80s after their last referendum vote and since montreal lost its status as a city of import to Toronto. They would go from a poor economic performer to exceptionally poor.
>Quebec has been sputtering since the 80s after their last referendum vote and since montreal lost its status as a city of import to Toronto.
City of import? Speaking as a tourist at least, Montreal is a much more interesting place to visit than Toronto. Toronto might be larger and have a bigger economy with more industry, but for a tourist I can't think of any reason to visit offhand.
>Quebec exiting anytime soon would be annoying for the country but a tragic mistake for quebec especially in seeing how poorly it has workout for the UK which had been an economic engine.
Separatists might not be that worried about economic power. Are all the Brexit voters unhappy with their vote now? A few maybe, but most probably are happy to be out of the EU, and blame their continued economic problems on immigrants, the EU, etc.
Your Toronto/MTL tourism comparison isn't wrong, Toronto is ugly and boring, MTL is beautiful and fun.
People love to talk about Quebec and separatism, they can go if they want, but they owe us $300B, so I doubt they are going any time soon, their "country" would likely fall over on go.
Oh I agree - Montreal is definitely a nicer city from at tourist perspective and frankly from a live-ability most likely. However tourism doesn't really translate to economic power - and most of that is predicated on government decisions and perceived instability from the separation vote. and in the 80s all the banks HQ's relocated to Toronto. Montreal was the most important city in Canada in the 80s for minute ... now it trails behind Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver.
I don't disagree - separatists don't care because they would be trying to grab power at all costs. The rest of the population would be the ones along for the ride.
Also worth reminding Brexit was reverting to a former country state, quebec separatism would be wholly new uncharted waters.
I have no idea what "a military conflict between what would become Western Canada and what used to be Upper Canada" refers to unless you meant the northwest and Red River rebellions, in which case it really stretches my (anglo) mind how that has more to do with Quebec separatism than any of the other grievances.
Even the "standard Canadian accent" is nearly indistinguishable from the "standard American accent" except for the o's and a few words that have a more British emphasis.
Respectfully, the Canadian accent (really, Canadian English) is noticeable and distinct from US English, in its pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Yes, there is a lot in common with US English, but calling them the same loses an enormous amount of nuance.
On the other hand, the difference between a dialect and a language is an army and a navy, neither of which Canada has much of.
The "standard Canadian accent" is pretty close to the Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota dialects -- sometimes called North-Central American English. Nowhere else in America really talks like that, though, and no one would call it the standard accent. I would say less than 4% of Americans speak with that accent.
Midland American English is what we would call the standard American accent. Most of Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and parts of surrounding states speak in this.
What I was referring to with the standard accent is the TV/phone/public speaking accent. The one everyone adopts when you want to sound as "normal" as possible. Colloquially known as "white people voice" among various racial minorities. Local dialects definitely exist, but they're mostly used locally. Cross-region communication is usually "standard".
From the Canadian perspective too, don’t think an American annexation of our landmass would go smoothly… Russians and Ukrainians are indistinguishable to an outsider and are currently unleashing centuries of built up ethnic turmoil on each other.
Anecdotal: I used to work with very right wing Canadian guys who cursed the name of the last president and called him all manner of names because of the trade war. These were the kind of guys who south of the border would have voted for him and bought the hat.
It’s not as simple as shared heritage == shared values.
The Canadian's had their own counter plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_Scheme_No._1 It would have been a gigantic failure. The plan was to try and mobilize quickly, seize Buffalo, Detroit and Seattle, and hold on for dear life until the BEF arrived. But the British were clear from the beginning that they were never going to send significant reinforcements to Canada: the ocean was too large, the USN too strong, and the Canadian plains too vast for the British army to be able to effectively defend. At most they might try and send some troops to defend Halifax as a key naval base. So the Canadian plan ensured that their best troops would be lost quickly, that the Americans would be super-pissed off and unified, all for an ending that would never come. So while it might have made sense militarily, it could never have worked politically.
The US war plan for the UK was similarly weird: according to Miller, _War Plan Orange_ War Plan Red was the result of a deal between the US Navy and Army. The Navy wanted War Plan Orange (war with Japan) and so they let the Army write War Plan Red (the UK). Which was why a war between the two mightiest naval powers on the planet in 1925 called for the US Navy to be on the defensive, at most seize the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Halifax to try and deny them as bases to the RN, and then the US Army would invade a separate nation (Crimson aka Canada) that would probably try and be neutral in the war!
Basically, from what I can tell, the US, Canada, and UK were putting their best war planners on the likely threats, and putting their less experienced and good planners on these war plans. Because War Plan Orange was, at least if you squint, how the US defeated Japan. And the Canadian and UK's war planners for mobilizing in World War Two and sending them to France did a bang-up job. It was just these plans that were not thought through and would have been disasters if implemented.
Any war between the U.S. and Canada would play out in strange, unpredictable ways just due to how closely intertwined pretty much every critical capacity of our two nations are.
Both the West and East coasts would immediately have their power grids upended by the loss of Canadian hydro. Fuel supplies (and practically everything else in both countries) would be disrupted as Canadian suppliers turn off the taps and American refineries go dark. Pipelines would, in all likelihood, be sabotaged so that they can't be started up quickly even once controlled. Large parts of Canada would go on a sudden bread and meat diet, since they rely almost entirely on imported fruit and vegetables.
Neither side would likely have the element of surprise, since both sides would be compromised by a large number of people in their command structures who are either from the other nation or sympathetic to it. A significant portion of U.S. forces would likely refuse to follow orders unless there was a damned good reason to invade Canada. Civil unrest in the U.S. itself would be a huge problem for the same reason. U.S. rivals such as China would pounce on the opportunity to take advantage of things while all this is going on. If the U.S. rolls into Canada then nobody is going to give a fig about Taiwan.
Occupation would be another matter entirely. The territory is massive and the enemy indistinguishable from yourself. Canada would present many of the same difficulties with terrain as Afghanistan, but with a populace that can tell which end of a toaster to plug in.
Since when does the US west coast depend on Canadian hydro electric generation? WA state has so much hydro the price goes negative every spring when the snow melts. There’s a half dozen LNG generators state wide for supply stabilization, several wind farms and solar arrays.
And the line loss would be too great to economically ship canadian electricity to California
Being able to import a few percent when you need it and export a few when you don't without having to spin something down is pretty important to having a stable power grid.
The reality is that there is no dividing line between Canada and U.S. when it comes to electricity. Power grids cross the 49th at will. In California, you're on the same interconnection as Vancouver and Calgary.
Conflict would disrupt power in both countries, and much further from the border than you may suspect.
I mean, this is all true for a war today. But the economies were not intertwined as tightly in 1925, which is when these war plans were being drawn up. The US and Canada had had a pretty nasty border dispute (at least from the losing Canadian side) just twenty years earlier, well within the memory of most politicians running Canada. (I suspect that most Americans had forgotten about the Hays-Herbert Treaty of 1903 by 1925, but it would have been far more prominent in Canadian minds.) With the passage of another century I would be honestly shocked if such plans existed today on either side.
Respectfully, I don't think Canadian <> American cultural exchange is anything like the Russian <> Ukrainian cultural exchange; beyond potentially passing the "indistinguishable to an outsider" test.
The modern and even pre-modern history of Ukraine is inseparable from a degree of violence that only existed in north america when directed towards slaves and indigenous population. There are not centuries of built-up ethnic/nationalistic turmoil between the U.S. and Canada, although I'm sure you could find some crazies who've convinced themselves there must be.
It’s because when the US thought it could invade and conquer, they were thoroughly trounced and had their original White House burned down. The strategic calculus never made annexing Canada a viable proposition beyond then, and there are enough cultural differences to prevent a peaceful annexation.
Similarly, Poland once occupied Moscow in the distant past and has managed to persist as a distinct nation, though the Russian calculus sometimes worked out against Poland such as during Russian-Prussian or Soviet-Nazi alliances.
Ukraine and Russia have their own history yet Ukrainians have managed to valiantly persevere as we can witness today. Unfortunately for geographic reasons the strategic calculus there is much tighter than US-Canada or Russia-Poland.
>It’s because when the US thought it could invade and conquer, they were thoroughly trounced and had their original White House burned down
By the British, not by "Canada" (which didn't exist).
To put another way, even had the US not invaded British North America, the UK would still have attacked Washington as part of the overall war. The one did not cause the other.
I think this is a misconception. It is the responsibility of the general staff to have a plan for any eventuality. The existence of such a plan does not imply that the political leadership has seriously considered launching military operations against a friendly neighboring country.
> I can't imagine Canada adopting economic, military or cultural policies that favor US enemies without being strong-armed out of it by the US.
Are you familiar with NATO? Clearly Canada wouldn’t do that - Canada can’t. But the existence of a treaty organization does not change how distinct we are.
As an example, school shootings. They’re far more rare here than population would dictate.
Every once in a while I come across some early mid century book that is handwringing about the increased "Americanization" of Canada so I think at some point perhaps there was more distinction. A lot of the anxieties around the free trade debates in the 1980s were about this.
But in general the relationships in NA work more North/South than East/West and the construction of Canada is fairly contrived. So while Canadians have a lot in common with Americans just across the border, this may be more regional cultural relationships. I would posit that your typical Seattle area Washingtonian has a more common culture with a nearby Vancouverite than they would with someone from Florida, Texas or New York.
I was in Canada last week and I saw a bunch of (real) English and (real) French Canadians. It dawned on me that the French Canadians resemble "redneck" Americans quite a lot more than the English whilst speaking a language that resembles French
The English Canadians (I wasn't in a major urban area, so these are what I call "real" Canadians) were quite different. Very reserved, low key and "proper". Unbearably stuffy.
>But countries form through common language, culture, religion, geography, interests or trauma/war. Anglo-Canada and the US have all the good things in common and no war/trauma keeping them apart.
Canada is indeed an anomaly. I can't think of another circumstance in which two countries that
* share land borders
* are 95% culturally, economically, and politically identical
* do not have longstanding historical grievances against each other
have not unified after two centuries; if anything, this fact implies that annexation is more likely than not to occur, perhaps sometime this century.
Americans on either side of politics think that Canada is full of super-leftists (and there is no shortage). But were Canada a part of the US in 2016, Trump would have won AB, SK, and quite possibly enough of the GTA (the parts that loved Rob Ford, and as "Ford Country" has repeatedly won the province for Doug Ford) to win ON, the province most resembling MI/WI/PA, the three states that Trump unexpectedly won the election with.
My existence as a Québécois helps explain why it hasn't happened. We collectively know that our language and culture are on shaky foundations with the Canadians; we know quick and painful assimilation would await us with the Americans. Canada is a country containing at least two nations, not just one.
Sorry; I meant to say "except Quebec" in the "95% identical" line, but it somehow got omitted.
When annexation happens I do not expect the US to be interested in Quebec because of language. I suppose that means that sovereignists ought to be in favor of US annexation.
That’s a giant if. How can you be so sure the US would have no interest in Québec? We’re not just a bunch of loser people. We have incredible talent in multiple high-investment fields, we’re the bedrock of hydro power on the continent, and we have the cool city all the Yankees want to see to pretend they went somewhere exotic.
The Americans know as much as me that quick and painful assimilation is possible. Why wouldn’t they wish to impose it on my nation?
Puerto Rico is still 100% Spanish-speaking, 125 years after annexation by the US.
It's possible that the US would annex Quebec and similarly keep it as a territory, but more likely is the US not bothering with it at all; why bring within itself an ethnic conflict that has bedeviled Canada for 250 years?
Your negative bias towards my people is showing; most raw raw Canadian federalists insist the mixture of both nations benefited the country, not made it more difficult to manage.
I'm an American, so have no brief for either side. I'm happy to believe that Quebec + TROC = greater than the sum of its parts. Maybe that would be true for the US; maybe that means Quebec as territory would be the best solution to satisfy both parties.
But even setting aside the unlikelihood of Quebecois used to having so much say in governing Canada accepting no longer having voting delegates in the national legislature, surely any such benefit for the US would be a lot less, relatively speaking. And, again, why would we bring in yet another ethnic conflict into our country?
Americans on either side of politics think that Canada is full of super-leftists (and there is no shortage). But were Canada a part of the US in 2016, Trump would have won AB, SK, and quite possibly enough of the GTA (the parts that loved Rob Ford, and as "Ford Country" has repeatedly won the province for Doug Ford as mentioned) to win ON, the province most resembling MI/WI/PA, the three states that Trump unexpectedly won the election with.
Once, and once during Covid
I mean Trudeau got reelected during Covid too because he temporarily relaxed restrictions, just to crank them back into high gear after winning again.
Also, Doug ford is no conservative, he’s just liberal lite. A pathetic spineless being
As a Canadian who is in the process of immigrating to the US, I feel that most Canadians think they are more similar to European than American. I'm basing this from having interacted with many Canadians during grad school in the US whom it would greatly trouble them if someone thought they were American. Perhaps it is a generational thing because I think my parents would probably say American if forced to choose but would say they are Canadians. Perhaps it is an international student perspective. I think most Canadians who think they are American just immigrate.
Usually emigrate focuses on the country of departure. All the forms I'm filling out have to do with immigration and not emigration because the process of leaving a country is not usually the legal hurdle.
In my experience, many (Anglo) Canadians behave like the coastal Americans who think of themselves as rather not American despite behaving very, very American.
I always find it funny how well coastal Americans diagnose the maladies that plague America while at the same time thinking they only infect inland Americans.
Case in point: America is a racist country. But the racial quotas in Ivy League Universities are perfectly fair. There is nothing wrong with punishing Chinese immigrants for the sins of English colonists from the two centuries ago.
> America is a racist country. But the racial quotas in Ivy League Universities are perfectly fair
One I realised I fell into was universally condemning everyone from places I hadn’t been as ignorant. I think what stalls the self awareness is that you think you’re just joking. But you’re not. You’re socially reäffirming a stereotype.
I'd say you two are pretty much like most Americans. ie - You readily identify the problems endemic to all the other Americans.
I do it too. It's the way we're socialized here in the US via everything from the media and music to political speeches.
What would be really interesting to know is if either of you are non-American? I have a sense that this proclivity might not be simply an American thing. I've wondered more and more if it's just human?
> readily identify the problems endemic to all the other Americans
I’d call out honest self reflection in small groups as uniquely and proudly American. We don’t have small group face-saving as a strong cultural streak. Almost in inverse, we champion it as a sign of trust and intimacy.
> interesting to know is if either of you are non-American
Immigrant American. We tend to be so convinced of our blue-blooded Americanness that we unblushingly use phrases like “blue-blooded American.”
More seriously, America is a superpower. Look at the contemporaries of any great superpower—Rome, the Han Dynasty, the Abbasid, the Ottoman, the British and the USSR—and the dominant narrative—paranoia, almost—is one of decline. Because that’s what’s left. There isn’t a competitor to aspire to. There isn’t pressure to improve. It’s partly why I think a bipolar world is for the best, even if it’s quite deadly—America and China competing is good. Russia diddlyfucking
America without guns and racial violence, BLM, Trump. Although they did have the convoy protests, it didn't escalate into an attack on the Parliament like in the US.
It depends on what one is referring to by "racial violence". The US has a long history of race riots, which have led to numerous deaths. While race riots have also happened in Canadian history, they have been far less frequent, and resulted in significantly less deaths. And the disparity remains even if you take into account the difference in size of the population.
If you physically segregate your underclass, they do tend not to "riot" in what I'm assuming you would consider a "race riot". Most deaths from "racial violence" aren't from "rioting" anyway, so focusing on that point is pretty silly, in my opinion.
According to the 2021 Canadian census, Vancouver is now a majority-minority city, 54% non-white. [0]
Also, keep in mind that in both Canada and the US, a plurality of the underclass are of European descent: in 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 37.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line, of whom 42.7% were non-Hispanic White, 28.0% Hispanic, 22.8% African American, 1.6% Native American, 4.8% Other. [1] (I don't have equivalent figures for Canada at hand, but I expect they will tell a broadly similar story, with European-descended people being the plurality of the Canadian poor.)
I said underclass was physically segregated. The US systematically discriminated against black people to form an underclass that shared a racial identity. Neither ethnic nor cultural Chinese in Vancouver are an underclass and have nothing to gain by executing a "race riot". The First Nations people you have so poorly treated are too small a fraction of the population and too dispersed for you to see a "race riot" on par with Los Angeles or Detroit, but the protests are there.
I was aware of the abuses agains indigenous Canadians, but it doesn't compare to the US. Maybe not without but certainly less.
"Higher numbers of hate crimes targeting a race or an ethnicity (+12% to 1,950 incidents) and a sexual orientation (+12% to 491 incidents) accounted for most of the increase in 2022. In 2022, hate crimes targeting a religion were down 15% from 2021 yet remained above the annual numbers recorded from 2018 to 2020."
These numbers can also go up if police do their job better and people trust them more and feel it worthwhile to report. Both are law-enforcement-provided, versus crime victim statistical surveys which are more accurate for the number of crimes committed (not just reported); though having their own drawbacks, of course.
A few years back Joni Mitchell was asked to participate in a project to create a tribute to her in downtown Saskatoon, and she suggested that it have a First Nations component.
It escalated pretty quickly. She got so frustrated that she comparted the flyover provinces to the Deep South in the US. The situation took five years to resolve.
Also with healthcare, a social safety net, people that care about each other and friendly , warm people. I was in the US for 5 months, then visited Canada for the first time after one hour I felt more at home there
And the convoy protests were funded by interests in the US. So it was a US political protest on Canadian soil.
I know you're joking, and fair enough, but I cannot let this comment stand ... joke or not. Canadians do not remotely ever think they are Americans, at all. Not even subconsciously.
I have a great respect for the US. Realistically, feel the US is family, and like family, I love and care for it. Yet at the same time, sometimes I shake my head, wonder what my sibling is doing, baffled... often concerned out of care for them, sometimes out of self interest. Yet I still care, and want the best for them.. even if pissed off, angry, or upset with that sibling.
There is so much shared history, coupled with so much bafflement.
I guess the best way to put it, is the relationship Canada has with the US is exceptionally nuanced, and this holds true for many Canadians.
As an immigrant to Canada, I don't think Canadians think of themselves as Americans, but they are way too much affected by what is happening in the US.
I bet if you rated all countries in the world by how much common people know and spend time looking at the internal politics of neighboring countries, Canada would be easily top 5. On the other hand, most countries outside North/South America have thousands of years of shared history, unlike the 3-4 hundred ones by (non-native) Americans.
In my opinion, Canadian should stop with this obsession and engage more with local politics.
> but they are way too much affected by what is happening in the US
Same with Mexico, but Mexicans are nowhere near as addicted to American news (Spanish language or English language).
TBH, most people consume news as entertainment, and outside of Postmedia Network media, Canadian reporting is fairly bland and boring.
Also, having spent some of my youth in rural and urban BC, in most cases purely Canadian television media didn't even really exist - everyone would be watching either a reskin of an American channel (Family Channel aka Disney) or an American channel (CNN, PBS, Fox).
Sure you had CBC but it was filled with ads and never talked about local issues anyhow.
That said, Western Canada is for all intents and purposes the exact same as Washington/Montana/Alaska - almost everyone in BC, AB, and the territories has at least 1 close relative who's an American or immigrated to America, and the only difference was that signs were occasionally in French, BC Ferries had a tiny portrait of Queen Elizabeth tucked in a random corridor next to a portrait of Harper or Trudeau, and Costco served poutine and charged 2x for milk and goods compared to the one in Bellingham
At least it's relatively culturally neutral in Cambridge, UK. Putting up a Confederate flag in Cambridge, MA feels like it would be risking property damage the next time the Progressive student mob gets a bee in their bonnet.
It's a shame that harmless political ideologies, like the belief that some people should be enslaved as chattel based on the colour of their skin aren't awarded the respect they deserve.
Next thing you know, people will start getting their knickers in a twist over someone flying a Daesh flag.
As my history teacher explained to me, back in the day, a small offshoot of Confederates had it with the war. They were weary. They were exhausted. And so, as many American hippies and conscientious objectors have done in the past, they decided to flee to Canada.
At this time however, they were worried about passing through Yankee territory, and also about their own troops shooting them for desertion. So, cleverly they modified their flag, and their uniforms, in subtle yet not quite discernible ways.
When approached, they would hold up their hands and describe at great length that the flag was much like the Ship of Theseus, each thread had been carefully replaced, and that their philosophical belief was that it therefore was not a Confederate flag. It may seem and look as such, but it as most certainly not! "What!", they would decry at such statements, "Are you ignorant louts! Have you no philosophical roots?", and so soldiers would feel great shame, and let them pass.
Thus after much hardship they managed to cross the border, settle down in a small town. I'm sure the flag you saw was probably only isolated to that one rural town though, but even so it just looked like a Confederate flag. It was instead copied from that other, unique flag.
This is false. It makes no sense. It can't be found anywhere. It reads like a bad Monty Python sketch. I can't tell if you're joking or if your history teacher was.
> they would hold up their hands and describe at great length that the flag was much like the Ship of Theseus
Okay that got a good chuckle out of me lol. Quality shitpost, could have sprinkled some lost cause/daughters of the Confederacy gaslighting in there too
I think the Canadian living in the US that you responded to was close to the mark. Most Americans have little contact with Canadians and many think of Canada abstractly, but not very accurately, as a European-like country located above the US. Beyond this abstract idea, most Americans don't have any reason to think about Canada on a regular basis.
Also, Canadians may not think of themselves as Americans, but young Anglo-Canadians are products of American culture. I roomed in college with one for a year and nothing was distinctly non-American about him besides the accent.
It's paradoxical. Like the famous I Am Canadian ad campaign being the product of a famous Canadian brewer...that was subsequently acquired by an American conglomerate.
Like how Tim Horton's, the quintessential Canadian institution, was bought by Burger King and remains "Canadian" if only for tax reasons.
> that was subsequently acquired by an American conglomerate.
Many countries and cultures are struggling with the excessive power of American capital, it bring with it Us-style management and 'way of doing things'.
This is 1000% correct. Canada is definitely not defined by "being American", or as Peter Zeihan would say: "passive-aggressively not-American".
Of course, when you're a small nation right next to the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, it's easy to have your media sphere be overwhelmed by the glut coming from south of the border. This is especially true as institutions like the CBC and NFB have come into increasing irrelevance while the internet replaces them. But this should not be misinterpreted as the country missing an identity or viewing itself as the same as the USA - that's simply not the case.
On a casual viewing, the similarity of external culture looks the same: we have the same shops, the same ugly modern strip malls, etc. We mostly look at talk somewhat the same, certainly in urban centers. But when you dive into the heart of our cultures, we had very different histories, and that's reflected in some big societal discrepancies. The USA is a bit of an outlier in a number of ways, and in many ways Canada resembles Scandinavian countries more than the USA.
Canadian culture is a vague and vacuous hole with the strongest defining feature being their insistence that they're not Americans. Someone from the UK or Mexico is so uniquely different that these's never been any confusion, but Canadians are constantly coping over this. Reminds me of how Texas is always threatening to leave the country.
> Canadians do not remotely ever think they are Americans, at all.
Nah. Canadians regularly see themselves as Americans with respect to political processes and laws. Presumably because of said American media consumption and believing what it portrays also applies to Canada.
Some examples of Canadians thinking they're Americans include the Convoy on the Canadian right larping as right wing Americans, and the "assault weapons ban" on the Canadian left larping as American Democrats.
Both of which aimed to solve for problems faced by Americans in America by doing something in Canada, when the same problems don't apply to Canada.
Well to be fair, most of that LARPing is being done by our PM who likes to piggyback on the cache of big American news stories. That's seen by many of us as being ridiculous.
How about our Prime Minister LARPing as a Democrat and spending a ton of money on a school lunch program that as far as I can tell (being an avid consumer of news across the country’s political spectrum) no one has ever suggested was an issue north of the border? At a time when we are already ludicrously overspending, no less.
When I was younger (decades ago...) Canada felt more 'exotic' than it does today. That may just be me getting older and less awed by new things, but I'm struck every time I visit by how much like America Canada is. Maybe that's why I like it so much. America but with universal health care :).
Disclaimer: I only ever go to BC (and I have lived in the PNW most of my life), so this might be a very biased hot take. I bet Quebec is a little bit different, as well as the other provinces & territories.
There are between 4-7 major subcountries in Canada (for reference, the US has 11 of them) depending on how you count them.
Those are the West (everything west of Upper Canada), Upper Canada (triangle formed by Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal), Lower Canada (Quebec), and the Maritimes.
If you're going more granular, you have Newfoundland, which is very different from the rest of the Maritime provinces (they have their own dialect of English), the North (sparsely populated but the kind of Canadian that lives there is different), and to a point Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
Of those, the West is functionally the Midwest (Vancouver and Island are not meaningfully distinct from Seattle/Portland/Bay cities in terms of politics) where each province is flavored towards the State to its immediate south, Upper Canada is culturally NYC-DC North (and for that reason is as hostile to the rest of the country as NYC/DC are to the US in general), Lower Canada is French (obviously), and the Maritimes are the Rust Belt.
The reason for Upper Canada's insularity (and to a point, Lower Canada's) is its age and geography: as the US found out in 1812 it's very difficult to reinforce across the Great Lakes. As for the West, there might as well be no border at all, so commerce and culture move freely (it also helps that, because plentiful natural resources and space causes a freedom-focused outlook on human rights, most people who live in the West will naturally have that in common with their southern counterparts).
The north-south cultural group is correct, but I'd disagree with some of the specifics you mentioned.
The cultural division between BC and the 'west' (AB, SK, MB) is pretty strong.
Southern Ontario is a lot closer to upstate ny / the midwest than NYC, I'd say.
The Maritimes is much more like New England than the rust belt. Newfoundland isn't even part of the Maritime provinces - it's part of the Atlantic provinces.
> you're going more granular, you have Newfoundland, which is very different from the rest of the Maritime provinces (they have their own dialect of English)
Just a heads up, Newfoundland isn't a part of the Maritimes at all, and those from Newfoundland will certainly remind you of that if you lump them in :)
Canada is being "Americanized", and the media and entertainment landscape is at the forefront of that.
I will say though, weighing in on a neighbouring nation while only having visited one of its provinces strikes me as a little bit conceited. A visit to BC is not going to give you much of a perspective of the diversity of this country.
Also: our health care is amongst the worst of the western nations at this stage. Subsequent governments have carved it away to be a shell of its former self.
That's a little harsh, I admitted as much in my post. I figured that my disclaimer would clarify that what I really think is "The PNW is very similar no matter which side of the 49th parallel you find yourself on."
I withhold any opinion on your health care; I've heard negatives, sure, but I've got no skin in the game. Philosophically I like it better than what we're doing in the US, even if the results have been lackluster so far.
Canadian here, and I think that especially on philosophical grounds, the Canadian system is terrible.
The state has a monopoly on the purchasing of healthcare services, it is illegal in most provinces to buy any healthcare for your family. The official marketing is that services are given out in priority order. In practice, it's rationed according to a lottery, your connections, whether you can afford to live near medical center, your ability to advocate for yourself, ability to show up an hour before a facility opens and wait in line for 5 hours, push through constant gaslighting by doctors whose goal is to dissuade you from receiving care (they'd rather you just give up and go home, here take this antibiotic and get out of my face), willingness to embellish symptoms to get higher priority placement, etc.
When the system utterly fails you, you have zero recourse. You just accept that you won't get to see a specialist for 6 months (if you're lucky, often a year). There is no escape hatch. Only if you're lucky enough to afford paying out of pocket and be able to get out of the country to get medical attention.
Millions of Canadians have no access to a family doctor (25-60% of British Columbians, for example). With increasing frequency, Emergency Rooms themselves are closing their doors (can't operate a whole 24/7 rotation).
On a philosophical level, I think it plainly evil that, even after I've paid such high taxes to fund everyone else's treatment, and then after the government refuses to provide me with adequate healthcare, after already paying for services not received, they then make it illegal to use whatever money I have left to provide basic healthcare to myself and my family.
> The state has a monopoly on the purchasing of healthcare services, it is illegal in most provinces to buy any healthcare for your family.
Why is it illegal to purchase healthcare privately? When I lived in the UK, I skipped the NHS and used my private insurance all the time to avoid all the issues you listed. Why not make it available to those that can afford the option?
Well, obviously I strongly disagree with this justification, but it's thought that if you allow for private healthcare options, that will suck resources out of the public system. If I use my own money to pay for the attention of a doctor, that's me taking that doctor away from the public system, making everyone else worse off.
Not sure if you're trying to downplay the problems or just offering a tip, but "You can flee the country and pay out of pocket somewhere with a functioning healthcare system" isn't much of a defense. Millions of Canadians aren't able to afford flight, hotel, time off work, arrange care for their dependents etc to go down to the states for weeks to resolve health issues. Not to mention, not all Canadians are even allowed to go to the states (people with criminal records, for instance). Also, hopping on a flight isn't an option for people with ongoing needs.
Yes those are real issues, and I didn’t necessarily mean to go to the United States, lots of people in the US also flee the border for certain medicine.
It’s, of course, a both/and situation. Try to improve things at home while searching for options if needed.
I do believe there is a bit of absurdity going on where parts of the Canadian system are trying to save money though by offering suicide.
> On a philosophical level, I think it plainly evil that, even after I've paid such high taxes to fund everyone else's treatment, and then after the government refuses to provide me with adequate healthcare, after already paying for services not received, they then make it illegal to use whatever money I have left to provide basic healthcare to myself and my family.
The evil part seems to be where they bilk you out of your tax dollars a few steps up the chain.
Downvoters may think this is an argument against universal healthcare, not realizing that it’s really an argument against a particular style of universal healthcare. Some countries, such as France and Switzerland, have a private sector that parallels the public sector, providing that escape hatch that Canadians are missing (unless, as you say, they cross the border to Bellingham or Buffalo, and can pay the US’s astronomical out-of-pocket expenses).
Most Canadians of sufficient age know that our healthcare system used to be the envy of the world. Sadly that has not been the case for 30+ years, and every government of the last few decades has compounded that problem. Some of it isn't even about funding per-se, but greed, bureaucracy and institutional power grabs.
We don't really have "universal healthcare" at all anymore, I don't know what you'd call such a dysfunctional system.
Don't worry, there's arguments against every system of health care, including the American health care and insurance industry. Doesn't mean there aren't productive reforms that can be done.
A linguist friend once told me that language patterns in North America run north/south. For whatever reason, culture and migration seem to work the same way.
If you are from BC, you are more likely to travel to or move to California than you are Nova Scotia or Florida.
Likewise, if you are from Montana, you probably feel more comfortable in Alberta or Saskatchewan than you would in New York or Alabama.
While our governments function very differently, NAFTA has removed most of the institutional barriers preventing the natural movement of money, people and culture between the two places.
time zone and climate vary much more east west than immediately north south considering the populated zones of Canada are almost entirely 100km from the US border.
What radio and then TV did, the Internet has continued. The world is shrinking, its cultures are merging, one day there will be one language, and one culture, or... maybe two yelling at each other.
I once heard, in the early 2000s, that more than 1/2 the languages spoken 150 years ago are gone.
eh, the internet also provides plenty of ways to split off into subcultures. maybe the subcultures cut across traditional nationalities but they're still there.
PB Blaster is the product everyone thinks WD-40 is. Even still, I wouldn’t use it in the place of real oil/grease/lubricant but in a pinch it’s far better than WD-40 for those odd chores.
For sure. PB Blaster is my go-to when I find a bolt on my truck that hasn't been touched since it left the factory in '88. Its a quick fix for a stuck bolt, but still not a great solution for a squeaky door hinge.
> But we’re not there yet, and according to projections we also won’t reach it this century
The best projections we have say our population will likely inflect downwards by the end of this century. In other words, we probably won’t even reach overpopulation.
Canadians have elevated Clamato juice with the Caesar, the purest nectar of the gods. Mexicans come close with micheladas and Americans have bloody Mary’s but nothing compares to a proper Caesar.
Bowling has been in a long decline. If I had money to get into the PE game, I probably wouldn't choose to invest in bowling, but hey, if someone wants to shovel a bunch of investor money into renovating bowling alleys, that can only be a good thing. The way I see it, there's two likely outcomes:
- The PE guys prove bowlings alleys aren't dead, and inject a ton of money and interest and arrest the decline, leading to a growth in the sport
- The PE guys don't arrest the decline, but end up injecting a ton of money renovating these locations, they eventually sell them at a loss to enthusiasts who now can keep these places running for a lot longer.
Either way, it's a win.
Pretty tired of the trope _PE == bad_. I wish HN could develop a more nuanced discussion of these ideas. Sometimes it's a wonderful thing to get someone else to prove viability.
One of the main points the article makes is that Bowlero spends the "ton of money" on superfluous additions (giant TVs, bars selling expensive drinks, etc) while forcing centers to operate with skeleton crews and cutting back on necessary maintenance. Bathrooms go days without being cleaned, there's no mechanics on staff to fix lanes that break down, and yet they keep raising prices. To me this doesn't seem like a good thing for the bowling community.
Maybe, but it’s also remarkable Canada hasn’t had a bank failure in >100 years. It’s a safe, peaceful and prosperous developed country. Hard to argue that Canada hasn’t done fairly well. I still agree it’s perhaps too risk averse, but I disagree it’s the worst performing of all developed countries in that regard.
The issue in California is not the price of insurance, it's availability because of extremely myopic ballot initiatives that are entirely political in nature. Should insurance be fairly priced, then the market can force people out of uninsurable areas and into areas with far less chance to burn.