Recently Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hung out with President Obama. The American left has been cooing all over Trudeau, and many people suggest they might move to Canada if Donald Trump becomes president. This idea of Canada as a haven for American progressives is an old one, and at times it has come in handy for Vietnam draft dodgers and runaway slaves. For many left-leaning democrats, Canada is considered something of a paradise, and in some ways it is–healthcare is a right of all people in Canada, and Canada scores better on life expectancy, homicide rate, obesity, social mobility, and in a number of other areas. But lately I get a sense that Americans are being perhaps a bit too utopian about Canada, and if you’re considering relocating, there are a few things you should know first.
Tag: Climate Change
Does the US/China Emissions Deal Make a Difference?
Recently the United States and China agreed to a carbon emissions reduction deal to combat global warming. Under the terms of the deal, the US agrees to reduce emissions by 26% to 28% from 2005 levels by 2025, while China agrees to reach peak emissions by 2030, and to generate 20% of its energy with zero-emissions technology by that year. Diplomacy is notoriously difficult, and consequently any deal on climate change heartens those who watch international politics. But are these emissions reductions sufficient to avert the worst of what global warming potentially has to offer? I’m not seeing much coverage of the deal from a climate science perspective, so I decided to look into it.
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American Voters are Completely Out of Touch With Economic Experts
I recently ran across a remarkable survey of prominent US economists on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the stimulus package Obama passed at the beginning of his presidency. The results are striking for two reasons–they show a clear consensus among economists that the stimulus was a success, and they completely contradict popular opinion.
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Science Gandalf: When Technology is Indistinguishable from Magic
As human technology develops, the way our gadgetry operates grows steadily less accessible to laypeople. Before the industrial revolution, it was relatively easy to understand how most human tools worked. Hammers hammer, hoes hoe, plows plow. As we’ve industrialized, we’ve begun to rely on more complicated scientific principles. Chemistry, electricity, non-Newtonian physics, computing, these things all grow steadily more important, yet only a very small portion of the population truly understands how any portion of these things operate, much less all of them. The rest of us live largely in the dark, and this has a curious effect–we increasingly blur the conceptual distinction between science and magic.
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The Firing Squad Case
Today I’d like to evaluate the firing squad case, a hypothetical scenario used in moral philosophy in an attempt to demonstrate that individuals are morally obliged not to participate in collectively harmful activities. A collectively harmful activity is an activity that is harmful, but is only in aggregate. For instance, driving your car is not individually harmful, but it is collectively harmful–while your emissions will make no difference at all to the future climate of the planet, the emissions of everyone together will make a difference. Let’s have a look at the case.
Benjamin Studebaker 