2011 in a nutshell

[themusicgod1]

(soundtrack)

Since it is my birthday today it is time to reflect on what the last year has meant, what were the major points and milestones within it and where I am going. Let's see what we had this year :

12. PotashCorp. With and without an provincial and federal election part way through the year resulting in a landslide victory for the SaskParty, one of the things that is happening and is going to happen big in my area is the development of the potash mining industry. Although china may be in net debt they still have a significant amount of spending money which was not the case even a decade ago -- china's soil is depleted and Saskatchewan's potash is a short-medium term way to stave off mass starvation and allow china to continue to exponentially increase (at a rate of 10% a year) its GDP by means of continuing to allow its farming to not exhaust its soil. China's increasing use of potash (not to mention the rest of the world including the US and an increasingly wealthy india) means that even ignoring other aspects of the Saskatchewan economy, people and corporations in Saskatchewan stand to benefit a great deal from the sale of potash.

Potash is an exhaustible resource but we have at least a few hundred dollars worth and no one is expecting it not to be sold for all its worth at some point. The questions are
1) will the general public benefit or just private interests
2) will it be taken out at a sustainable pace, used in ways that facilitate the development of sustainable alternatives, will it be used as a 'club' to weild against starving countries like india and force them into the greater economic system?
3) will saskatchewan maintain royalty rights on the potash itself(if I understand correctly now, currently the province owns the potash but allows people to develop it through a set of rights designed to encourage economic growth) or will it give up ownership of this valuable resource (as the Sask party seems to be interested in) for pennies on the dollar to allow private industry to exhaust it as quickly as possibe and at benefit to only them?

etc.

This year however I think both the Saskatchewan and Canadian government did something quite unexpected -- it stood up against a large corporate interest attempting to purchase already privately owned royalty contracts property and so on by purchase of privately owned PotashCorp in saskatchewan. This would have
i) given the australian company BHP control over the rights to mine and produce potash in the province
ii) guaranteed the minor ecological catastrophe that is potash mining would continue
iii) guarantee a huge increase in potash royalties followed by a slow tapering off of royalties into whatever level of production most benefitted BHP as opposed to the one that benefits potashcorp
iv) which in turn allows the saskatchewan provincial government to decrease taxes and/or pay off its debt entirely if not both by means of increased revenue.
v) did I mention that BHP would inject something on the order of the GDP of saskatchewan into the canadian/saskatchewan economy to purchase it?

Depending how you draw up the numbers and contrary to the insistence of both liberal, conservative, green and NDP POVs this would effectively double the GDP of saskatchewan with no real change in terms of royalty ownership or production levels -- potash would be continued to be mined unsustainability with profits accruing to private interests at a point that can be easily taxed, but 'wag the dog' applies here -- practically everyone was convined that a prosperous saskatchewan in the form of doubling our gdp and mining investment wasn't in our best interest and contrary to free trade laws and so on the deal was blocked, which is really odd considering how important canada takes free trade especially with regards to issues like ACTA and copyright.


• 11. #Occupy
  
  "Everyday we stay there in Tahrir, we win more"
  
  While it's hard to not to get lost in the economics and capitalistic POV of the possibility of effectively doubling the paycheque of everyone in saskatchewan from #12, we bring ourselves to notable event #2 - the boiling over of discontent around the globe, and in the west in particular.
  
  For me, this story starts in egypt in tahir square with a friend's account of the turmoil there. Egypt has issues that make ours look rather tame by comparison, but the end result is somewhat similar - the government would rather cut the public information commons from the people than allow change to occur, and the people took to the streets rather than allow things to get worse or allow the government to continue doing this. There's a lot of perspectives to go around on this issue - but the sparks that lit a fire in egypt and in much of the world ended up actually catching some dry ground in New York, which eventually even spread as close as my own hometown saskatoon, and my current home in regina. I ended up getting really sick and for my own health stayed out from the cold - kind of a cop out I know but as evidenced by my other posts on this topic local #occupy camps had their own flavour, and in part due to the economic boom local to saskatchewan the local one wasn't an all-in thing for anyone but the ones who had no choice(for which there were some). But even so
  i) The problem of homelessness in regina surfaced and showed some of its properties among with first nations education as two major issues in saskatchewan.
  ii) Unlike saskatoon which offered shelter to the occupiers, regina left them out on the cold when they closed the protest down.
  iii) Pat Fiasco was shown to be quite the asshole. People representing a significant portion of the province weren't even given the right to go into city hall to express their greivances, and a public protest ended up being shut down, albeit peacefully, guarantee that the next time something like this happens, violence will be likely employed.
  iv) the cops in regina were shown to be cooperative with the public and upright citizens, even when they were ticketing the #occupy protesters they did so only to the extent that was required of them. Sure they could have crossed the line and joined them but
  v) Due to the kinds of economic booms involved in #12 with oil, potash, IT, etc the general public was against #occupyregina in general.
  vi) the whole ordeal showed that it is possible, although we should expect resistance at every level, to organize the whole of the world, and to remake the world. People are ready.
  
  However, we had around the world a real grassroots revolutionary sentiment building, and its lifting tide reached as high as regina - not even the cold winds of winter stopped it, only public apathy, and 'I've got mine, fuck the world' sentiment that can only happen when things are going well in a local area that is insular and not connected to the rest of the world in a meaningful way beyond trade. Saskatchewan's increasing reliance on oil as a means to solve all our regional problems increases the chance that as time goes on we will continue to miss chances like this to join the rest of the world in solving the problems of this generation and those prior, remaking the human apparatus by blinding us to everything but the possibility that we are doing fine, by making us defenders of the global status quo and by making us more vulnerable to larger players(the US, russia) who will inevitably use our reliance on the status quo as a means of control and exploitation.
  
  
• 10. #ripple, #wikileaks & @Jaro Larnos
  
  It's too bad that I've been stuck on a sleep schedule that is very north-america(weekdays) and france specific(during weekends) and I've been utterly out of phase with Jaro as he has featured prominently in the most interesting things in this year that have happened. In part due to the growing counterveiling force to the unipolar, globalist-tightly-economically-coupled-to-the-point-of-breaking-everything world, #wikileaks emerged as the last effective global journalistic entity, as well as a real hope for change that for example Barack Obama has not been(despite his earlier marketing). And naturally, they found one of their heads(@JulianAssange_ one of their sources (bradley manning )) arrested for about a year without charge, and their 3 main sources of income(and many others) cut. But thankfully I've been dabbling in decentralized currencies -- ie money systems that are neigh impossible to censor/cut once established, so thanks to Jaro I've been able to not only continue to support wikileaks financially myself but offer to anyone who I have established trust relationships with(or anyone who has established trust relationships with those people ad infinitem) a means of circumventing US foreign policy and contributing to this global treasure.
  
  Credit is starting to be tight but you can still donate to wikileaks through ripplepay if you are connected to me in any way. Fuck hillary clinton and her attempt at censoring the world and preventing global change and the solution of our problems, we have created a way around her.
  
  
• 9. While wikileaks donations were important, and new instantiations of ripple came out -- ripple's global effect was still limited. While ripple was still bubbling up, Bitcoin came into the world as a major economic force, commanding at one point a hundred million (canadian) dollars worth of value as a conduit for all sorts of economic transactions allowing people to buy everything from peyote to large houses. Although there was a bubble which popped, the resulting fallout did not doom the decentralized currency, once a competitor to ripple now entrenching itself as a useful and valuable thing in the world, decoupling the global economy as it goes from the US dollar and creating opportunities for skipping over middlemen like Western Union who for a long time now have been nickling and diming people half to death who really need something better - expats of places like the phillipines and mexico who leave their country to work. Although penetration of markets has yet to occur in a significant degree to my knowledge, not only the technical apparatus and social apparatus is present but the hard cash and value backing the system is also present. If it's not made outright illegal bitcoin will have a huge effect on these people and the world at large.
  
  
• 8. with all the above, the passive reader might wonder why any of this matters. What problems are there that are so bad, so intractable and incalculable that we have to expend human creativity, new economic systems, journalistic systems and democracy itself to solve? It's possible as I have for the past year to keep your nose fairly low and to spend most of your time working on short term, profit-related issues and to never rise above to the global level and to think strategically. However once you start using the internet for something other than porn you can start seeing hints of it. The facebooks of the world may want to keep us in walled gardens where all knowledge of these problems is forbidden(as it might expose role as contributors *to* the problem), but for example - 2.5 million people die every year in preventable situations due to the use of fossil fuels. For some scope, that is like 2 saskatchewans every year dying due in part to what the people in saskatchewan are pulling out of the ground and giving to them. Granted it isn't just us that's pulling fossil fuels out of the ground, it isn't just us that's spilling CO2e into the air as quickly as we can, it isn't just us who are promoting and marketing the increased use of fossil fuels...but outside of those in #11 we are certainly not really helping. Something to consider anyway.
  
  
• #7 And by the way, genocide is still going on and the terrible things that the 20th century showed us was possible to automate, systematize and embed into culture have continued to have been so. If we had any sense at all, we'd be all weeping uncontrollably. Rememberence day will continue to be empty to me until at least this situation is addressed - and we know, for one thing, more war, more arms, more US defence spending isn't helping.
  
  
• #6 While all that is going on, our ability even express such terrible things on a deep level through art and other means is under threat by way of the trial of remy couture. I make somewhat disturbing art - my music is unpleasant to listen to sometimes (see dusty cartridge) and while it is perhaps not as thought provoking as the awesome dolls that Jade makes, I at least try to move the human spirit in the very same way that remy couture and other canadian artists aspire. We need art, we need artists, we need to support artists and copyright maximalists and others who are not standing behind remy couture right now stand to me as giant hypocrites for not being there for artists in their time of need.
  
  
• #5 First philosophers, then bayesians start giving science a run for their money as the organizing force of human understanding, knowledge and intelligence -- but Google, the singularity bud it is has given us a new idea that will be game changing: google correlate. Google correlate as it stands, is a massive dataset of what people are looking at, but more importantly it serves as a new way of conducting science in general. Instead of wondering merely doing an experiment, gathering results, and then using the results to confirm/deny some hypothesis google correlate allows us for really the first time to plug our dataset into the cloud, and to get back a result of what else does this data correlate with? This allows emergent patterns all over the place to be detected at the end of an experiment, it allows what googlem, or any singularity knows to be shown in glimpses to the meagre humans who run them. It allows us to get a glimpse into the secret order of the universe in a new way much like science and mathematics itself gave us a glimpse into the secret order of the universe in a new way back in the days of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz -- all we need to do now is move the data we already have into something that correlate can index. Problems that were intractable become trivial with this tool as a retroactively 'obvious' part of our everyday fabric of life.
  
  
• #4 Wayne Crookes v. p2pnet.net was won by the p2pnet.net, allowing the Internet in Canada to have a significant victory at the supreme court level. Our right to use the internet without fear of lawsuit, and by proxy, all public and civic rights was under threat, but thanks to Jon Newton, the line in the sand was drawn, and held.
  
  
• #3. This year was an election year, and despite the current government being charged with contempt of parliament, they were somehow reelected to a large majority. That being said, I helped the NDP campaign both with my time as a foot canvasser, and as a financial donor and my efforts were rewarded by the NDP gaining official opposition status for the first time in history, and helping the NDP do what for my entire life seemed impossible to many canadians - uniting quebec within a federalist canadian movement. The election will have an impact in terms of copyright law(and hence regulation of increasingly good approximations to general purpose turing machines and the internet), human rights, the global, local and national economic picture, and so on and so on. Either way you spin it, the election and the collapse of the liberal party as official opposition did change things and continues to do so.
  
  
• #2. It's always risky putting women into these kinds of lists, but I think one of the major highlights of my year would be the introduction of goldfishlaser into it. It may be too early to tell, but I think I've finally found my match. <3. It's sad that we started so far away and it's unclear how and if we can make our lives work in such a way as to be meaningfully shared, but I am trying. She has been there for me at every turn and has shared this past year with me more than anything other thing other than work.
  
  
• #1. I found myself in a situation where I did not release information that was important to one party to that party, despite being asked in a way that was probably dishonest. I kept the parties who would be negatively affected in the loop but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I really should have been open about the whole thing and my actions should have been on the other side of the honesty line, even at a large cost at the time -- because once left in that state, it becomes exponentially more difficult to extract myself from the situation.
  
  The incentives surrounding the whole thing doom any attempt at resolving it now in any ethical way without hurting people far beyond any benefit to myself in redeeming myself and/or reputation.
  
  The net result however is that with no exception I have been an honest person until this year. All I can do is try, with the rest of my life, to make it up to the parties involved and to resolve never to do this again, as I will be bound to secrecy about the matter for the most part is not concerning things which can be public knowledge.
  
  When I was living in a closet, starving and walking to and from a miserable job making other people's lives miserable for a living as a telemarketer I felt the only thing I had left, that could not be taken from me was my honesty. Although I am richer in some ways than I was then, better fed and warmer -- I've lost that. And that is what 2011 has meant to me.