30 days left on Marlee

Today begins my final month on Marlee Avenue. My landlords at Old Orchard Properties unlawfully refuse to assign anyone new to the lease, or to recognize me as a tenant even though they have been collecting rent from me faultlessly for two years.

I have not low income for years and the job hunt is proving difficult. Finding somewhere to live is more urgent and fundamental though. If I can find an OK room with good people for $800–$1000, I should subsequently be able to find an OK way to pay the rent.

Morneau linking economic growth to social stability

Asked about de-growth and related concepts as a response to the apparent unsustainability of quality of living improvement based on economic growth:

If we have declining GDP per capita, it is very hard to have social harmony against that challenge.

Former Canadian Minister of Finance Bill Morneau, at a 2023-04-28 Massey dialog

Unchangeable light fixture

Want to change this light fixture? You can either be 15 feet tall and balance on the stairs, or you can put a ladder beside the wobbly railings and lean over the chasm to take off the cover (unusually cheap for taking one bulb instead of two) and change the bulb.

—Questionable architecture from Franca Siesto and Tony Siesto’s Old Orchard Properties in North York

6 million views on Flickr

One of the reasons I have always found the internet so exciting is because it facilitates a kind of interaction which I find a bit magical: any time it is possible for somebody to help someone out by using information or material which has been publicly shared. That way, the person who needs help can make use of the photo or follow the instructions without any need to correspond with the person helping them, or for that helper to even still be alive.

My photography is released under a Creative Commons license to facilitate such usage. My usage guide explains the generous set of things you can do for free, including making prints for personal use or for inclusion in anything you aren’t selling.

How status quo bias blocks political change

Studies carried out in diverse settings demonstrate that system justification engenders resistance to personal and social change. In the United States, political conservatives—and high economic system justifiers—often down-play environmental problems such as climate change and accept false statements about scientific evidence, as we saw in the last chapter. In Finland, perceptions of climate change as threatening to the national system predicted general system justification and justification of the Finnish food distribution system in particular (Vainio et al., 2014). In Australia, economic system justification was associated with a lack of engagement with environmental issues and decreased support for pro-environmental initiatives (Leviston & Walker, 2014).

Craig McGarty and colleagues (2014) have put their finger on a key problem facing opposition movements, namely “the taint of illegitimacy that comes from attacking a national government that is wrapped in national symbols, controls national institutions, and … represents critics as being disloyal to the nation” (p. 729). This formulation of the problem is highly conducive to a system justification analysis because backlash against protestors often reflects system-defensive motivation (e.g., Langet et al., 2019; Rudman et al., 2012; Yeung et al., 2014). Members of mainstream society are typically suspicious of those who challenge the status quo, and their backlash intensifies in response to system criticism. Nevertheless, system justification motivation can be harnessed to promote social change, as we saw in the preceding chapter, and justice critiques may help delegitimize the status quo over longer time periods. Furthermore, the promotion of utopian thinking about alternatives to the status quo appears to undermine system justification motivation while strengthening commitment to social change (Badaan et al., in press; Fernando et al., 2018).

Jost, John T. A Theory of System Justification. Harvard University Press, 2020. p. 267-8