My most recent weekly column at GuildMag is now online. With everyone eagerly awaiting the start of this weekend’s beta event, it may be my least-read column for months.
June 8, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Toronto City Council’s latest collective brain-fart
Terence Corcoran is too kind in his discussion of Toronto’s new ban on plastic bags:
In star-struck liberal green Los Angeles, it took a full-court press by environmental groups, major propaganda efforts, endorsement by the roll-over editorialists at the Los Angeles Times, and deployment of Hollywood stars, such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Peter Fonda, to work up the political steam needed to prompt L.A.’s city council to vote last month to ban plastic bags.
In starless Toronto, all it took was a bunch of dumb city councillors who suddenly decided — seemingly out of the blue — to stage a surprise vote.
“Ban the bags,” somebody said. “Good idea. Let’s vote!” Passed: 27 to 17.
No study, no research, no public review, no thought, no concept and no brains. What’s the environmental and fiscal impact of the ban? Nobody knows, although many people say the cost to both the city and the environment will be greater than the cost of using plastic bags.
As I think Adrian MacNair mentioned, one of the most likely outcomes is that people will end up buying less. It’s those little impulse buys that will be curtailed the most, as many folks — especially tourists — won’t have realized they need to bring their own carry bags.
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A Gen-X lament: “none of these “experts” … even agree on when we were born”
By any reckoning, I just missed being in Gen-X, as the earliest date anyone seems to use is 1961 (so my sister is a Gen X’er, but I’m a very-very-very-late boomer, apparently). In spite of that, most of my friends seem to identify much more with Gen X than the plutocratic fat cats of the early Baby Boom generation. Kathy Shaidle explains the three biggest myths about Generation X:
… the term “Generation X” was popularized by our contemporary Douglas Coupland’s titular 1991 novel. (And Coupland swiped his title from the name of Billy Idol’s old pop-punk band; my fellow ex-punk Kinsella should know that, too.)
There are lots of things “great minds” got wrong about Generation X since they started writing and worrying about them. (I mean, us.)
After Coupland’s novel — about over-educated, underemployed pop culture addicts who’ve formed an ad hoc “family” of friends – swept the planet, countless “consultants” (including, briefly, Coupland himself) started marketing themselves as experts on my demographic.
These consultants made a whole lot of money, keynote-speaking to job-for-life CEOs about why we Gen-Xer’s were all so broke and unemployed.
And the most irritating (and yeah, ironic) thing is, none of these “experts” (“X-perts”?) even agree on when we were born.
[. . .]
The takeaway for pundits and other “experts” is:
“Generation X” isn’t synonymous with “young people today.”
I’m gonna be 50 soon. Dammit.
[. . .]
Like the Y2K “experts” who came after them, all those demographic gurus and futurists who got rich theorizing about Generation X ended up looking pretty foolish. (But never had to give their money back.)
When we Gen-Xers were trying to get our first jobs out of college or high school, we did indeed contend with an economy burdened by a triple-feature of double digit horrors: inflation, unemployment and interest rates were all way over 10%.
We blamed those damn yuppie Baby Boomers. They’d beaten us to all the good jobs and were never gonna give them up.
(In the same way hippies had used up all the safe-ish drugs and free sex, and left us with crack and AIDS.)
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The only two political classes that matter
James Miller in the National Post:
Nineteenth century political theorist and former U.S. congressman John C. Calhoun once wrote, “…the necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide the community into two great classes… to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.”
Throughout history, this is precisely how the dynamic between government and the people has played out. Politicians make careers out of redistributing wealth. Persistent inflation and the running up of public debt have proven that governments are incapable of spending within their means. Retaining elected office hinges too much upon buying votes.
With the post-war boom years came increasing amounts of tax revenues. This was all too enticing for politicians to pass up. Entitlement programs were created to ensure a steady supply of votes. Mr. Moore is correct in alleging that younger generations were thrown to the wolves for these promised benefits as they had no say in the matter and are now forced to foot the bill.
At the same time, millennials themselves have been fooled through years of pervasive government and nanny-state decrees into not only expecting entitlements but also misunderstanding the value of prudence. Living standards only rise when the majority of the public produces more than it consumes. This age-old lesson has been slowly forgotten with years of the expansionary welfare state and popular economic theories which favour consumption. When youth are made to believe the most important rule in all economics is “in the long run we are all dead,” is it any surprise when financial discretion takes a back seat to overindulgence?
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Allergy season strikes
I’ve had fall and spring allergy issues since I was a teenager. They’re pretty predictable in symptoms: dry, itchy eyes and full sinuses followed by sneezing and/or coughing (depending on which direction the sinus overflow headed). Over the last several years, the intensity of the allergy attacks has steadily declined, which has been great. This week, however, I got the worst symptoms I’ve had in at least a decade and it came on with little warning.
I tried to tough it out for the first couple of days, but as I really wanted to be awake and de-symptomized for the GW2 Beta Weekend Event kicking off later today, I figured I’d better take some allergy medicine. It turns out the only package of Claritin I had is past its use-by date. The unopened package expired in October.
Of 2009
I guess I really have been doing well in the allergy line recently.
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