Neonicotinoids are a great type of chemical that would be irreplaceable if we were under attack from a deadly insect scourge. However, 'neonics' (as they're often named to avoid confusing the majority) are actually not even used to destroy mosquito and botfly populations, and instead do a great job of accumulating in the environment and killing the real terrors of the insect world: bees. Yeah those bastards won't be pollinating any harvests any time soon, as if their decimations at the hands of mites and disease weren't enough, we added a chemical that makes them even weaker and more susceptible to death. Why? To protect the most vulnerable among us: the hard-working farmer (read: multinational incorporated agribusiness).
From now on, I guess, every keystone species we destroy by our extremely clever ignorance will be replaced with some kind of robot substitute. That's a pretty fantastic way to provide public welfare for anyone who majored in mechatronics. Furthermore I think it's a great way to cover up our culpability, our wastefulness, and our immense capacity for destruction and self-destruction and wounded innocence (check out the screeds from defenders of neonics for the latter). I always thought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was implausible but with each passing year certain background elements of the story get more and more realistic. Soon, maybe even next year, some multinational will build an emotion-controlling app and the crowd will go absolutely wild, then very calm, then really happy, then annoyed for a millisecond, then wild again with rapturous applause.
I mean, with that device/app we won't even need to feel bad about where all our mistakes have led us, and we can finally accept the tone-deaf happiness of being a casually murderous and purely scientific species, we won't need to feel aghast at the inefficiency of our lifestyles or the mountains of redundant waste they create, the genocides playing out in the natural world will no longer be a cause for concern, the seas will die but we will go on. We will simply use our abilities in the scientific realm to stitch together nigh-forgotten lengths of DNA and voila - a salmon mixed with a mackerel that can spawn anywhere! A cow mixed with an elephant that produces eleven or more tons of flesh and over a hundred gallons of milk a day. What's that? You want wings? 1.8 million dollars and a few rounds of painful and dangerous gene therapy/surgery and you will have an haphazard pair.
First, obviously, we'll need to do the robot thing to ensure that our food supply doesn't collapse in flames, and also to keep honey on store shelves (Who doesn't love honey? Maybe only the chemical mastermind who invented neonicotinoids). As usual, when the story dawned that neonics were killing bees, it took roughly until the first report that profits may be affected and businesses ruined for anyone to give a fuck. Listen, I like honey more than anyone and always have, but I won't accept robo-made honey. That's weak. For millions of years there's been an animal making honey, we didn't have to make it, we could even co-operate with them for other benefits, and that's still cool to me. I kind of wonder what other cool animals might have arisen in the absence of homo sapiens industrialis: vast cuttlefish capable of spaceflight, a naturally three-legged dog, an ant species that writes novels.
But fuck all that. We're gonna finish what we started when we exterminated the neanderthal, except this time it's not even personal. This time it's even worse: it's business as usual.
And I get it. Nature is resilient and our survival is paramount - life will go on either way. Only hippies will get worried about this. Farmer Joe needs neonics to ensure he gets to harvest 85%+ of his crops. It's not like we're the stupid ones for planting big fields of food and being annoyed that animals will eat them. Poisoning them for their arrogance is exactly the ticket. Despite what the left-wing, envirofascist hippies say, this is good. There are no links or chains in nature - it's fight or flight, survival of the fittest, each to his own. Pesticides keep wildlife from becoming addicted, welfare-like, to what's rightfully ours. Nevermind how it all kept going without us, or what's going on now, this is how it must be. God. Law. Money. Private property. Et cetera, bitch, and this isn't an ongoing disaster or a sign of anything pathological - so don't even start with that. Plus robots are cool and drones will never become problematic.
11/5/14
Young? Canadian? Out of work? Work for free! No, not for me.
As if it isn't already easy enough to hire someone to work without paying them or even the intention of doing so, well fuck it... who gives a fuck what a rich privileged person has to say about it... basically you're fucked anyway. The job market in Canada for young people is hyper-competitive and relatively small, and most get to circle the drain of uselessness working shitty jobs and part-time just to get by, many others live 'in their parents' basements', and prospects are such shit that even the head of the national bank is telling kids to join the Peace Corps or whatever organization will take their unpaid work. Even stacking up degrees is less useful than it was. You'd pray for an unpaid overworked internship now, and if you don't know how to network: get ready to belong to the underclass.
Soon enough it won't be enough to be willing to help out a charity with anything but money, and they already generally like money better than people. You'll need 1-5 years' experience just to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and the police will be called on you just for walking down the street looking suspiciously unemployed, show your volunteer card please. Capitalism is hell, actually, and it keeps proving it more succinctly than any ignorant campus marxist ever could. Impure Capitalism like we have now is even worse, it's simply a bunch of cancerous money tumors that fuck everyone over while their collaborators twiddle their thumbs and tell a chronically underemployed generation to get over it and toughen up, then thumb their noses at them on their way out. The crab bucket is so full that nobody even knows if the ones getting out have qualifications or anything, the sheer volume of jobless fucks and underemployed losers is beginning to reach critical mass, and no amount of start-ups will solve what may well be a systemic problem.
Meanwhile the immensely profitable banking sector in Canada, the ones who used to be purely profitable banks but now also offer 'financial services' and sell boneheaded products to the gullible and afraid masses, is laying off every greasy wage-earner they can find so their profits don't get sullied by collusion with normal working people. I think the question on everybody's mind is "Where is this hellscape leading us? Will things improve?" The answer is maybe, but more importantly: why don't you just go volunteer somewhere for a whole year so you can demonstrate that you are using your post-secondary bachelor's degree properly and gaining experience? Learn to be a good worker before you become a paid worker. They're gonna have to cut the bottom out of the crab bucket, and all signs indicate they're sure as hell willing to.
The only upside is that maybe everyone who is young and unemployed or even underemployed will go volunteer and somehow that will result in... more jobs? More experienced jobseekers? The betterment of society seems more likely. Maybe it's time those sitting in big comfy corner offices start doling out some of that experience they've been hoarding in their corporations, and actually hire and train people, instead of pontificating from the position of material and professional comfort. Until then, they're a bunch of callous, insincere windbags making judgments on a situation they can only pretend to fully understand – one they likely never had to face when they were in your shoes.
This is all starting to seem so parodical.
Soon enough it won't be enough to be willing to help out a charity with anything but money, and they already generally like money better than people. You'll need 1-5 years' experience just to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and the police will be called on you just for walking down the street looking suspiciously unemployed, show your volunteer card please. Capitalism is hell, actually, and it keeps proving it more succinctly than any ignorant campus marxist ever could. Impure Capitalism like we have now is even worse, it's simply a bunch of cancerous money tumors that fuck everyone over while their collaborators twiddle their thumbs and tell a chronically underemployed generation to get over it and toughen up, then thumb their noses at them on their way out. The crab bucket is so full that nobody even knows if the ones getting out have qualifications or anything, the sheer volume of jobless fucks and underemployed losers is beginning to reach critical mass, and no amount of start-ups will solve what may well be a systemic problem.
Meanwhile the immensely profitable banking sector in Canada, the ones who used to be purely profitable banks but now also offer 'financial services' and sell boneheaded products to the gullible and afraid masses, is laying off every greasy wage-earner they can find so their profits don't get sullied by collusion with normal working people. I think the question on everybody's mind is "Where is this hellscape leading us? Will things improve?" The answer is maybe, but more importantly: why don't you just go volunteer somewhere for a whole year so you can demonstrate that you are using your post-secondary bachelor's degree properly and gaining experience? Learn to be a good worker before you become a paid worker. They're gonna have to cut the bottom out of the crab bucket, and all signs indicate they're sure as hell willing to.
The only upside is that maybe everyone who is young and unemployed or even underemployed will go volunteer and somehow that will result in... more jobs? More experienced jobseekers? The betterment of society seems more likely. Maybe it's time those sitting in big comfy corner offices start doling out some of that experience they've been hoarding in their corporations, and actually hire and train people, instead of pontificating from the position of material and professional comfort. Until then, they're a bunch of callous, insincere windbags making judgments on a situation they can only pretend to fully understand – one they likely never had to face when they were in your shoes.
This is all starting to seem so parodical.
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