Thinking about doing this for my neighbours but for pizza crust. You spend long enough really getting the hang of a baking recipe and immediately feel very compelled to share it.

That just means that you don't have one party which consistently fits your ideology. It doesn't mean you don't have one.

"A shifting orb of pragmatism" is an ideology.

So, ideology means further from the center. And you're in the center, I suppose? So the more something disagrees with you, the more it has an ideology. Sounds very convenient.

I think he'd have a shot in Ontario, the Maritimes, BC, maybe Manitoba.

I joined the party to vote for him and it was very much not to pull the Libs to the left. It was to form government.

What do you mean by an ideological NDP party. Isn't every party ideological? Isn't that their whole job?

Good thing he's not a Provincial NDP leader then.

Canada Post is finally phasing out door-to-door delivery for good.

They're also "modernizing" (i.e., cutting) the network of post offices.

I guess we knew for a while that they were going to do this. It's exhausting watching everything around us constantly get worse.

www.cbc.ca/news/busines...

Triceratops? Yabasic. Ankylosaurus all the way.

Yeah, obviously he has a role in setting priorities, etc., for Green councilors and councils.

But I wouldn't want him or his people trying to make detailed manifestoes for every local government in England and Wales. They've got enough on their plate making one for the national government!

pico-hydroelectricity?

What does that even mean?

Given that it's local elections, it's not really Polanski's place to make plans, is it? That would be up to the local parties and their council candidates.

The Scottish Greens are a separate party.

I think we need to do both. Degrowth with green tech.

On plastics, I think there are only a handful of uses where there are no viable alternative materials. Medical uses are a good example, as you say. But for that stuff we could use bioplastics. For everything else: Wood, metal, glass, etc.

There are also opportunities to reduce our consumption of these things, just by making technological changes downstream.

For example, a big percentage of the world's steel is used to make cars. Fewer cars -> less steel.

Similarly, we can reduce our reliance on fertilizer with new farming methods.

I'm less familiar with the pharmaceutical and pesticide industries. But energy consumption in industrial chemistry is in large part just about heat and pressure, which can be electrified. Fossil feedstocks may be an issue. I'd have to read more about it.

That's a great reason to prioritize public transit and active mobility instead of electric cars!

The other things you listed have low-carbon alternatives.
Cement: Basalt-based cement production
Steel: Electrowinning, biochar, or hydrogen
Fertilizers: Electrolytic hydrogen for ammonia production

Iran certainly thinks it is.

The rich, ideally. Possibly on carbon. There are lots of options.

I agree 100% that we need degrowth. But it's not really accurate to say that that 80% is only possible thanks to fossil fuels. We can electrify most of it.

Same place the government always raises revenue. Taxes.

Except that his hands were not tied at all! He could have paid for the military expansion by raising new revenue.

Literally nothing I have said supports that interpretation of my position.

I'll talk to whoever I want about whatever I want, thanks.

There are, for example, a lot of criticisms about how CPI is calculated. Because reducing a phenomenon as massive as inflation to just a few annual numbers inevitably requires some loss of fidelity.

The use of national medians has a similar problem. It ignores specific places and income brackets.

No, I did not say "simpler and better". I said that the question they are trying to answer is simpler.

We can be pretty sure there isn't a hidden crime wave because crime stats are at least good enough to detect such a thing. The same thing does not necessarily apply for economic stats.

Great. I acknowledge all that. Do you agree that, despite all those issues, crime statistics are still good enough to tell us that crime is in fact down? Or at least that there is not a massive crime wave like some politicians claim?

My point is that the number of different variables that connect "the economy" to the wellbeing of an individual person in the economy, is so massive that inevitably you have to make decisions about what is relevant and what is not. And those decisions might leave important things out of the picture.

My point is that the availability, accuracy, and completeness of a body of statistics is not the same thing as how well those numbers measure reality.

I'm assuming you're not arguing that crime hasn't actually gone down, right? Despite their issues, crime statistics do in fact show good news?

For crime, the question the data has to answer is very simple: How many murders/robberies/assaults/etc were there in a given place in a given time? Sure there are empirical challenges, but nobody disagrees that that is a clear indicator of how good/bad the situation is.

Not so for economic data.

That doesn't really answer my point. The question of "how well is the economy doing," is complex, multifaceted, subjective, and impossible to fully capture in a numerical indicator.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but we shouldn't treat the data as a trump card in an argument.

Economic data has the same measurement and observation problems compounded by the fact that the very nature of the question you're trying to answer is inherently fuzzy and ill-defined.

Even if it's hard to measure precisely, "how many murders happened last year" is a very simple question.