#Brian Dijkema

[the-end-of-art]

Rapid fire

Two small excerpts from two Comment pieces on attention, distraction and technology:

From Habits of Mind in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs:

This passage reminds me of something the comedian Louis C.K. said a few years ago, in an appearance on Conan O'Brien's show. Louie, as his friends call him, was explaining that he doesn't want his kids to have cell phones because he wants them to be sad. And sadness comes when you are forced to be alone with your thoughts: "That's what the phones are taking away, the ability to just sit there. That's being a person."

He described a day when he was driving along as an emotionally intense Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio, and he started to feel a certain melancholy welling up in him, and his instant response to that melancholy was to want to grab his phone and text someone. "People are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own, because they don't want to be alone for a second," he said.

But on that day when, in his car, Louie felt the melancholy welling up, he resisted the temptation to grab his phone. As the sadness grew, he had to pull over to the side of the road to weep. And after the weeping came an equally strong joy and gratitude for his life. But when we heed that impulse to grab the phone and connect with someone, we don't allow the melancholy to develop, and therefore can't receive the compensatory joy. Which leaves us, Louie says, in this situation: "You don't ever feel really sad or really happy, you just feel . . . kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. And that's why I don't want to get phones for my kids."

FREEBASING HUMAN CONNECTION

By our immersion in that ecosystem we are radically impeded from achieving a "right understanding of ourselves" and of God's disposition toward us.

If you ask a random selection of people why we're all so distracted these days—so constantly in a state of what a researcher for Microsoft, Linda Stone, has called "continuous partial attention"—you'll get a somewhat different answer than you would have gotten thirty years ago. Then it would have been "Because we are addicted to television." Fifteen years ago it would have been, "Because we are addicted to the Internet." But now it's "Because we are addicted to our smartphones."

All of these answers are both right and wrong. They're right in one really important way: they link distraction with addiction. But they're wrong in an even more important way: we are not addicted to any of our machines. Those are just contraptions made up of silicon chips, plastic, metal, glass. None of those, even when combined into complex and sometimes beautiful devices, are things that human beings can become addicted to.

Then what are we addicted to?

In February 2016, Ben Rosen, a twenty-nine year-old writer for the massively popular website Buzzfeed, wrote a post about what he had learned about the social media service Snapchat by talking to his thirteen-year-old sister Brooke.

He got interested in this topic when he watched Brooke reply to forty snaps—that's the basic unit of Snapchat, like a tweet on Twitter—in less than a minute. So he asked her questions about how she uses, and thinks about, Snapchat. Three things emerged from that discussion.

First, for Brooke and her friends Snapchat is almost never text, it's all images, usually selfies in which they respond to one another with various facial expressions, as though they're using their faces to imitate emoticons. Second, Brooke is not unusual in being able to do forty of these in a minute. Third: When Rosen asked Brooke how often she's on Snapchat she replied, "On a day without school? There's not a time when I'm not on it. I do it while I watch Netflix, I do it at dinner, and I do it when people around me are being awkward. That app is my life."

Brooke also noted that "parents don't understand. It's about being there in the moment. Capturing that with your friends." And when her brother asked her how she could even mentally process forty snaps in less than a minute, much less respond to them, she said, "I don't really see what they send. I tap through so fast. It's rapid fire." Snapchat is a form of communication drained almost completely of content. It is pure undiluted human connection.

So there is a relationship between distraction and addiction, but we are not addicted to devices. As Brooke's Snapchat story demonstrates, we are addicted to one another, to the affirmation of our value—our very being—that comes from other human beings. We are addicted to being validated by our peers.

OUR ECOSYSTEM OF INTERRUPTION TECHNOLOGIES

If you don't believe in God, you might not think this craving for validation is a problem. But if you do believe in the God of Jesus Christ, it doesn't look good at all. As Paul the apostle asks the Galatians, "Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ" (1:10).

Now, to be sure, there is one sense in which we should care what people think of us. Paul tells the Romans, "give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all" (12:17). But that is in order to commend Christ to the world in all that we do and say, to avoid being a stumbling block to those who might otherwise come in through the door of faith. That's a very different thing than seeking to "please man" because you so desperately crave their validation. If you measure your personal value in the currency of your Snapchat score, then you will be profoundly averse to doing or saying anything that might lower that score or even limit its growth.

A few years ago the science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow published an essay in which he referred to "your computer's ecosystem of interruption technologies." Keep in mind that Doctorow wrote that phrase before smartphones. My iPhone's "ecosystem of interruption technologies" makes the one on my computer seem like pretty weak sauce, because the latter is on my desk or in my bag while the former is ever-present. And it's ever-present because I like it that way. I choose the device that interrupts my thinking and, as Louis C.K. observed, gives me an ever-present opportunity to escape unwanted emotions.

I am a living illustration of Technological Stockholm Syndrome: I have embraced my kidnapper. Or, to change the metaphor yet again, I have welcomed this disruptive ecosystem into my mental domicile and invited it to make a home for itself here—like those poor kids who let the Cat in the Hat in.

The church who would draw such novices has a historically new task as well.

But an awareness of the potential gravity of this situation has gradually dawned on me. I have been significantly affected by this pocket-sized disruptor, even though I had decades of formation in a different attentional environment to serve as a kind of counterweight. People like Ben Rosen's sister Brooke, the Snapchat queen, clearly don't have any of that. I wonder what her future—her future as a self, as a person—will hold.

Our "ecosystem of interruption technologies" affects our spiritual and moral lives in every aspect. By our immersion in that ecosystem we are radically impeded from achieving a "right understanding of ourselves" and of God's disposition toward us. We will not understand ourselves as sinners, or as people made in God's image, or as people spiritually endangered by wandering far from God, or as people made to live in communion with God, or as people whom God has come to a far country in order to seek and to save, if we cannot cease for a few moments from an endless procession of stimuli that shock us out of thought.

It has of course always been hard for people to come to God, to have a right knowledge of ourselves and of God's threats and promises. I don't believe it's harder to be a Christian today than it has been at any other time in history. But I think in different periods and places the common impediments are different. The threat of persecution is one kind of impediment; constant technological distraction is another. Who's to say which is worse?—even if it's obvious which is more painful. But I really do think we are in new and uniquely challenging territory in our culture today, and I don't believe that, in general, churches have been fully aware of the challenges—indeed, in many cases churches have made things worse.

In his 1996 essay "Philosophy . . . Artifacts . . . Friendship," the Catholic priest and theorist of technology Ivan Illich provides numerous insights into these challenges for the church in our age of distractions. He writes:

The novice to the sacred liturgy and to mental prayer has a historically new task. He is largely removed from those things—water, sunlight, soil, and weather—that were made to speak of God's presence. In comparison with the saints whom he tries to emulate, his search for God's presence is of a new kind.

. . Today's convert must recognize how his senses are continuously shaped by the artifacts he uses. They are charged by design with intentional symbolic loads, something previously unknown.

And remember, Illich wrote all this before the Internet. What he wrote then is even more true now: the age of television and print ads for Persil now seem a very primitive endeavour indeed. If then it could be said that "our perceptions are to a large extent technogenic," they are now almost wholly technogenic, for most of us. If Illich is right to say that "the novice to the sacred liturgy and to mental prayer has a historically new task," then that means that the church who would draw such novices has a historically new task as well.

SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF—SQUIRREL!!

And what Illich says about how we "search for God's presence" is related to how we understand and talk about and preach sin.

When George Whitefield and John Wesley were preaching sermons that created the First Great Awakening, they almost always started by trying to arouse in their hearers a conviction of sin. The typical sequence of their sermons looked like this:

1. You are a sinner, though no more, or less, of a sinner than anyone else. 2. We sinners cannot rescue ourselves. 3. But God in his grace and love has come to rescue us. 4. So we need only to accept that grace and love, in penitence, to be reconciled to God.

But I don't believe we can readily reach people today with the same sequence. The very idea that I am a sinner sends me groping for my smartphone to avoid unpleasant emotions. I think this will be especially true for the majority of North Americans whose basic default theology is what the sociologist of religion Christian Smith and his colleagues call Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. For such people an awareness of sin is going to be hard to achieve—certainly at the earlier stages of their Christian lives.

But what if we tried to tell people that by disconnecting, however temporarily, they might be able to hear God? Consider these thoughts by Rowan Williams:

The true disciple is an expectant person, always taking it for granted that there is something about to break through from the master, something about to burst through the ordinary and uncover a new light on the landscape.

And I think that living in expectancy—living in awareness, your eyes sufficiently open and your mind sufficiently both slack and attentive to see that when it happens— has a great deal to do with discipleship, indeed with discipleship as the gospels present it to us. Interesting (isn't it?) that in the gospels the disciples don't just listen, they're expected to look as well. They're people who are picking up clues all the way through.

We need to put people—those who don't yet believe, those whose belief is young, those whose lives with Christ have become attenuated in a "technogenic" environment where our thoughts are largely directed by engineers— in a position to "pick up clues."

From Learning with Your Hands by Matthew Crawford with Brian Dijkema:

BD: What you mean by a political economy of attention?

MC: A few years ago I was in a supermarket and swiped my bank card to pay for groceries. I then watched the little screen intently, waiting for its prompts. During those intervals between swiping my card, confirming the amount, and entering my PIN, I was shown advertisements. Clearly some genius realized that a person in this situation is a captive audience. The intervals themselves, which I had previously assumed were a mere artifact of the communication technology, now seemed to be something more deliberately calibrated. These haltings now served somebody's interest.

Over the last ten years a new frontier of capitalism has been opened up by our self-appointed disrupters, one where it is okay to dig up and monetize every bit of private mindshare. And very often this proceeds by the auctioning off of public space; it is made available to private interests who then install means for appropriating our attention. When you go through airport security, there are advertisements on the bottoms of the bins that you place your belongings in. Who decided to pimp them out like that? If my attention is a resource, and it is, then the only sensible way to understand this is as a transfer of wealth. It is an invisible one, but the cumulative effects are very real, and a proper topic for political reflection. Maybe for political action too.

BD: And people who want to guard their inner life are forced into themselves. It forces you to put a book in front of your face.

MC: Right, that's one of the hidden costs. What's lost is the space for sociability in our public spaces. Like you say, we're driven into ourselves with sort of an arms race between private attention technologies versus the public ones.

Of course there's another solution. If you have the means you can go to the business class lounge which in some countries like France is silent, there's just nothing. That's what makes it so incredibly luxurious. When you think about the fact that it's the marketing executives in the business lounge who are using that silence to think — to come up with their brilliant schemes which will then determine the character of the peon lounge — you begin to see this in a political light. When some people treat the minds of other people as a resource, to be harvested by mechanized means, this is not "creating wealth," as its apologists like to say. It is a transfer of wealth.

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Worlds 2019 - 6 minutes warm-up before group 6 in Men's SP by J SPORTS

Translation post 18

Original language: Japanese

Translator’s note: This is not a word-for-word translation. I paraphrased some of the things said in the broadcast to clarify the main point.

Announcer: Chizuru Kobayashi. She is a freelancer who has been working for figure skating programs on J SPORTS for years.

Commentator: Makoto Okazaki. ISU Technical Specialist and a coach. He won a bronze medal at 2001 Winter Universiade as a singles skater and has been contributing figure skating columns titled "岡崎真の目 (Eyes of Makoto Okazaki)" to Sponichi.

PA announcer: Skaters for group 6, please take the ice. 

Kobayashi: And now, here comes the final group.

Okazaki: Yes.

Kobayashi: The audience is so loud that we have to be loud as well to not be drowned out!

Okazaki: Indeed.

PA announcer: We are going to introduce the skaters in group 6 in the order of skating. Mr. Yuzuru Hanyu. Mr. Shoma Uno. Mr. Jason Brown. Mr. Mikhail Kolyada. Mr. Keegan Messing. Mr. Nathan Chen.

Kobayashi: Now they are introducing each skater. Yuzuru Hanyu, and Shoma Uno. Jason Brown of America. A bronze medalist last year, Mikhail Kolyada. Keegan Messing of Canada, and the defending champion, Nathan Chen of America.

Kobayashi: Now, the warm-up for the last group has started. We are showing the starting order again on the screen. The final group will start from the skater No. 30, Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan. Then Shoma Uno, Jason Brown, Mikhail Kolyada of Russia, Keegan Messing of Canada, Nathan Chen of America will follow.

PA announcer: We are now introducing the skaters for group 6.  Skater No. 30, Mr. Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan. He won two consecutive Olympic titles. After vowing to continue competing in this season, he won GP Finland and Russia in succession but then got forced to sit out due to injury. This is the first time for him to compete after the injury and to skate in front of the Japanese fans in this season.

Kobayashi: Now, they are introducing the skaters one by one. You know this skater who won two consecutive Olympic titles and many World medals including two golds. It's Yuzuru Hanyu. (Listens to the PA announcer) That's right, this is the first time for him to skate in front of his Japanese fans. They have been waiting for this moment.

Okazaki: Yes.

PA announcer: Skater No. 31, Mr. Shoma Uno of Japan. He is the silver medalist from PyeongChang Olympics. At Japanese Nationals this season, he won three consecutive titles with a powerful performance despite the injury he suffered during a warm-up. At 4CC last month, he came back from 4th after the short and won the long-desired senior championships title.

Kobayashi: And Shoma Uno. He won three national titles in a row. (Listens to the PA announcer) The 21-year-old Japanese Shoma Uno says that he is taking a new approach and he wants to compete focusing on achieving a result this time.

PA announcer: Skater No. 32, Mr. Jason Brown of America. He is loved by the audience for his prowess to express the music delicately and for his cheerfulness. He is also known as a Japanophile. He moved to Canada this season and has been training under coach Brian Orser.

Kobayashi: Now, this is Jason Brown of America. (Listens to the PA announcer) He says that this season, he wants everyone to see new Jason, another side of him.

PA announcer: Skater No. 33, Mr. Mikhail Kolyada of Russia. He is the bronze medalist from GPF Nagoya last season and the bronze medalist from Worlds last year. This season, he finished 2nd in Russian Nationals and 5th in European Championships and is representing Russia at Worlds for 4 years in a row.

Kobayashi: Now, this is Mikhail Kolyada of Russia. (Listens to the PA announcer) He aggravated sinusitis going into Russian Nationals and got hospitalized, but forced himself to compete at Nationals and finished 2nd.

PA announcer: Skater No. 34, Keegan Messing of Canada. This season, he finished 2nd in GP Canada and got through to the Grand Prix Final for the first time in his career. His great-great-grandfather was the first Japanese who immigrated to Canada, so he has roots in Japan as well.

Kobayashi: (Listens to the PA announcer) This is Keegan Messing of Canada. The great-great-grandfather (t/n: mentioned in the introduction) is Mr. Manzo Nagano.

PA announcer: Skater No. 35, Nathan Chen of America. He is the defending World champion.  At the Olympics, he fell behind in the short program but moved up from 17th to 5th place with an outstanding performance in the free skating. This season, he entered the prestigious Yale University and won two-consecutive GPF titles while trying to balance study and training.

Kobayashi: And this is the defending champion, Nathan Chen.

(Nathan lands a 4Lz)

Okazaki: Oh, that was nice.

Kobayashi: Yes.

Okazaki: The jump looked very sharp.

Kobayashi: The defending champion Nathan Chen has 5 different types of quads in his arsenal. It is always interesting to see how he incorporates them in his programs.

Okazaki: Yes, it is.

Kobayashi: In this competition, he is planning to keep the jump layout with which he won U.S. Nationals. Well, he did so well at that competition, didn't he?

Okazaki: Yes, he did.

Kobayashi: Now the camera is focusing on Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan. This is his first competition in four months. But he has overcome this kind of situations.

Okazaki: Yes. He is a very tough athlete.

Kobayashi: Indeed. And here is Shoma Uno, who truly wants to challenge him this time. Mr. Okazaki, how do you see this warm-up?

Okazaki: Well, it seems everyone is moving very sharply... (Hanyu falls on Salchow) Oops, Hanyu kun fell a bit.

Kobayashi: Yes. He is the first skater of this group, but he says that he likes this skating order…

Okazaki: Yes.

Kobayashi: He has a good impression of it.

Okazaki: Well, it enables you to start performing without getting off the ice. (t/n: after warm-up)

Kobayashi: Right... Now, they are introducing the ISU President Mr. Jan Dijkema. ISU was established in 1892 in the Netherlands. Mr. Jan Dijkema is also from the Netherlands.

(The standings after group 5 is on the screen)

Kobayashi: Now we are showing the current standings. Vincent Zhou of America is currently in the 1st place, scored 94.17. Two skaters have surpassed 90 points so far, but no one surpassed 100 points. However, in group 6, there are skaters who will likely to surpass it.

Okazaki: Yes, there are.

(End of 6-minute warm-up)

Kobayashi: 6 minutes warm-up has ended. Finally, this moment has come.

[worklabournewsresearch]

Lands for Jobs: An Employment Lands Strategy for the Province of Ontario

“As part of its ‘Open for Business’ agenda, the Ontario government has enacted various policy reforms to improve the province’s investment climate. These reforms have come in the form of tax reductions on certain capital investments, a series of de-regulation measures, changes to the province’s apprenticeships and skills training framework, and so on. The underlying assumption is that the cumulative effect of these policy reforms will ultimately make Ontario more attractive for domestic entrepreneurs as well multinational firms to invest and grow here.”

“This is a key point: there are no silver bullets or panaceas to improving the province’s investment climate. A wide range of factors inform business investment decisions – including overall economic context, interest rates, taxes, labour, energy, regulatory environment, transportation networks, property rights and rule of law and even sociocultural considerations such as diversity, pluralism, and tolerance.[1] These various inputs and factors can be broadly described as a jurisdiction’s overall ‘business environment.’ An ‘Open for Business’ agenda will therefore necessarily touch on a wide range of policy areas.”

“The first section of the policy brief sets out the trends in business investment in Ontario. The second provides a brief primer on the relationship between employment lands and the business environment. The third describes the current intergovernmental framework for employment lands and business property taxation in Ontario. The fourth analyses best practices in some comparable jurisdictions. The final section puts forward possible policy reforms for consideration by provincial policymakers.”

Ontario 360 Policy Papers, February 20, 2020: Lands for Jobs: An Employment Lands Strategy for the Province of Ontario: Sean Speer examines various Ontario policy reforms that are aimed at improving the province’s investment climate.

Ontario 360 website

More Ontario 360 Policy papers:

Ontario 360, February 13, 2020: Advancing Structural Reforms to the Skilled Trades and Apprenticeships in Ontario, by Brian Dijkema and Sean Speer Brian

Ontario 360, January 30, 2020: Integrating Newcomers into Ontario’s Economy: A Strategy for Professionally Skilled Immigrant Success, by Jon Medow and Ollie Sheldrick

[moviesteem]

OPINION: One in three Ontarians getting hosed on construction contracts

BY BRIAN DIJKEMA, Special to the Toronto Sun

You can learn everything you need to know about the effects of restricted competition on the cost of infrastructure by buying a pizza at the Air Canada Centre. The same large pepperoni pie that costs you about $12.50 at a pizzeria will set you back a honking $40 when the Leafs play the Habs at home.

The same thing is true for Toronto, Hamilton, the…

[thebulletintoronto-blog]

Federal budget short on innovation or social value

It seems what’s old is new again in Budget 2017, presented to the House of Commons.budget shortfalls

The big federal budget deficits of the 1970s and ’80s? They seem to have taken up permanent residency again in Canada. Federal finances will be in the red for the foreseeable future while annual spending jumps from $315 billion last year to $330 billion this year—largely because of interest paid on government debt.budget shortfalls

The innovation agenda that will help the middle class? Well, there’s not much that’s innovative about it. It assumes that government is the primary agent of delivering change and social stability for the middle class—the same philosophy that’s guided most federal spending for decades.budget shortfalls

Some simple examples make the budget shortfalls case.

The federal government has committed $7 billion over 10 years to fund daycare spaces in Canada. These won’t be home-based, neighbourhood daycare spaces. They’ll be the institutional kind, which is the kind parents favour the least.

What’s more, daycare funding isn’t even about making sure low-income parents are able to work. A report published by the Advisory Council on Economic Growth on Feb. 6 explains that one government goal is to get parents (mostly mothers) of young children into the workforce in order to increase the gross domestic product. It’s as though the government only defines parents’ value as measured through economics. The funding puts the government in the driver’s seat with one childcare option heavily favoured.

Or take the almost $1 billion committed toward creating high-tech “superclusters.” Again, government is driving the bus. In fact, Cardus work and economics program director Brian Dijkema makes a rather wry observation about big government funding for economic growth.

“There’s a sense in which their desire to form superclusters sounds like old attempts to grow clusters of cucumbers in Newfoundland,” he said.

Yes, government tried to fund cucumber production in Newfoundland in the late 1980s. The result? According to the CBC, cucumbers did grow in the province, but at a cost to taxpayers of $27.50 each. At the time, you could buy an out-of-province cucumber in a grocery store for 50 cents.

Government funding to spur new industries is neither innovative nor new.

It’s worth noting that this same government-first mentality comes through in another way through Budget 2017. The booklet has 11 references to “social infrastructure.”

What does the government mean by that? According to the budget document, social infrastructure is made up of “affordable housing, high-quality, affordable child care, and cultural infrastructure like community centres, museums, parks and arenas.” In other words, this type of infrastructure is almost all government-owned in one way or another.

Unfortunately, that’s a complete misunderstanding and misuse of the term. Canada’s social infrastructure is actually comprised of the business and labour groups, volunteer associations, cultural institutions, families, faith communities, and educational institutions that exist apart from government and make up our civil society.

A truly innovative approach to helping the middle class wouldn’t start with government. It would not be based on a centrally prescribed vision.

No, renewal of social infrastructure—or architecture—would instead create the conditions in which all of society could thrive.

There is, however, very little that would create bottom-up social flourishing of that sort in the budget document tabled in the House of Commons last week.

— Ray Pennings is executive vice-president of public policy think-tank Cardus.

    © 2017 Distributed by Troy Media

Federal budget short on innovation or social value was originally published on The Bulletin

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Worlds 2019 - 6 minutes warm-up before group 4 in Men's FS by J SPORTS

Translation post 21

Original language: Japanese

Translator’s note: This is not a word-for-word translation. I paraphrased some of the things said in the broadcast to clarify the main point.

 Announcer: Chizuru Kobayashi. She is a freelancer who has been working for figure skating programs on J SPORTS for years.

Commentator: Makoto Okazaki. ISU Technical Specialist and a coach. He won a bronze medal at 2001 Winter Universiade as a singles skater and has been contributing figure skating columns titled "岡崎真の目 (Eyes of Makoto Okazaki)" to Sponichi.

  (Skaters for the final group take the ice)

Kobayashi: Here comes the group 4, the final group. The arena is filled with loud cheers. First, they introduce each skater. Vincent Zhou of America, who finished 4th in the short program. Shoma Uno of Japan, who finished 6th in the short. Matteo Rizzo of Italy, who finished 5th in the short. Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan, the winner of two consecutive Olympic titles. He finished 3rd in the short. The defending champion, Nathan Chen of America, who finished 1st in the short. The last skater is Jason Brown of America, who finished 2nd in the short.

(Starting order is on the screen)

Kobayashi: These are the 6 skaters to skate in the final group. Now, we are showing the starting order on the screen. This group consists of 3 American skaters, 2 Japanese skaters, and an Italian skater.

Okazaki: Finally.

Kobayashi: Yes, finally. Our commentator today is Mr. Makoto Okazaki.

PA announcer: We are now introducing the skaters for group 4 in the order of skating. Skater No. 19, Mr. Vincent Zhou of America. After moving up to the senior level last season, he survived the fierce domestic competition and proceeded to PyeongChang Olympics. At PyeongChang, he fought bravely and finished 6th in total earning the second-best technical score in the free skating. This season, he finished 3rd in 4CC and won his first senior ISU championships medal.

Kobayashi: OK, we are going to introduce the skaters one by one. This is Vincent Zhou of America who finished 4th in the short program. He has many types of quads in his repertoire.

Okazaki: Yes, but this time, he is planning to do only 3 types of them, doing each of them once.

Kobayashi: Yes.

Okazaki: I guess his plan is to do what he can do and to do it properly. You know, his jumps often get called under-rotated, so he is going to stick to what he can do cleanly, I guess.

Kobayashi: Uh-huh.

(Vincent lands 4S)

Okazaki: His quad Salchow looks good today.

Kobayashi: Yes.

PA announcer:  Skater No. 20, Mr. Shoma Uno of Japan. The silver medalist from PyeongChang Olympics. This season, he won at GP Canada and NHK Trophy and won a silver medal in GPF. At Japanese Nationals, he achieved a three-peat, and at 4CC, he came back from 4th after the short program and won the long-desired title of a major senior competition.

Kobayashi: Next up is Shoma Uno of Japan. He is planning to do three quads of four different... no, he is planning to do 4 quads.

Okazaki: Yes, he is going to do four quads of three types. I hope he will nail the quad Flip since he fell on it in the short program.

(Loud cheers in the arena)

Kobayashi: When you hear this kind of cheers, it means that someone has landed a good jump somewhere.

Okazaki: (Laughs) Right.

PA announcer: Skater No. 21, Mr. Matteo Rizzo of Italy. This season, he stood up on a GP podium at NHK Trophy as a first Italian men's singles skater and won a bronze medal at European Championships as well. At Universiade held recently, he won the title with his high-quality performances.

Kobayashi: Now, this is Matteo Rizzo of Italy. He is planning to do one type of quad once in the program as a solo jump. He finished 5th in the short with a clean program.

Okazaki: I figure that he is aiming to nail the quad securely and execute other elements cleanly.

Kobayashi: Uh-huh. He is the champion of Winter Universiade.

PA announcer: Skater No. 22, Mr. Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan. He won the Olympic titles consecutively in Sochi and PyeongChang. He also won the Worlds titles in 2014, here in Saitama, and in 2017. This season, he won gold medals in 2 GPs. After that, he got forced to sit out due to injury but has made a comeback here in this World Championships.

Kobayashi: And now, this is Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan.

(Hanyu lands a 4Lo)

Okazaki: Oh, a quad loop. Very nice.

Kobayashi: Yes, it was! Mr. Okazaki, how do you think about his jump layout?

Okazaki: He is planning to do four quads of three types. However, he has the potential to earn huge GOEs... (Hanyu lands a 4S) Ah, that was nice. A quad Salchow.

Kobayashi: That was very nice.

Okazaki: (Goes back to the previous subject) ...So his jumps can totally compete with more difficult quads such as Lutz and Flip. Let's hope for the best.

Kobayashi: Yes.

PA announcer: Skater No. 23, Mr. Nathan Chen of America. He is the defending World Champion. At PyeongChang, he skated strongly in the free skating and finished 5th. This season, he entered the prestigious Yale University and won two-consecutive GPF titles trying to balancing study and training.

Kobayashi: And now, this is the defending champion, Nathan Chen. He is the only one who scored over 100 points in the short program. His score was 107.40.

Okazaki: He is also planning to do four quads of three types.

Kobayashi: Right, including Lutz and Flip.

(Nathan lands a 4Lutz)

Okazaki: Hmmm... That was nice.

Kobayashi: He landed it.

Okazaki: Somehow.

PA announcer: Skater No. 24, Mr. Jason Brown of America. He is loved by the audience for his prowess to express the music delicately and for his cheerfulness. This season, he moved to Canada and has been training under coach Brian Orser. After winning a silver medal at GP France, he came back on the podium at U.S. Nationals for the first time in two years.

Kobayashi: There is 10.59 points difference between Nathan Chen and Jason Brown who was 2nd in the short program. The third-place finisher Yuzuru Hanyu is 12.53 points away from Nathan. Here is the last skater, Jason Brown. He is going to do only one quad.

Okazaki: Yes. Hope he will go for it.

Kobayashi: I hope so, too. Until last season, he has been incorporating a quad toe-loop, but this season, he has been tackling with quad Salchow. He has not landed it successfully yet, right?

Okazaki: Hmmm, I think so.

(Loud Cheers)

Okazaki: Ah, looking good. Uno has landed a quad Flip and then Hanyu landed a quad loop. Let's expect good performances from our skaters.

Kobayashi: Yes. ...You know, it is hard to decide who to focus on in these 6 skaters.

Okazaki: Indeed. It is kind of distracting in a good way...

Kobayashi: (Laughs) Yes.

Okazaki: This situation does not allow us to focus on a skater.

Kobayashi: Indeed. This men's free skating is the last event of this competition. We have already known who are the medalists in the other three disciplines.

Okazaki: Vincent Zhou has landed a quad-Lutz-triple-toe combination too. (t/n: Nathan Chen is on the screen and lands a combination when Okazaki says this, so there is a possibility that he confused Vincent with Nathan, or he thought he was saying "Nathan Chen" instead of "Vincent Zhou.")

Kobayashi: Yes. You know, every skater has been training hard for this season's last competition.

Okazaki: Hope everyone can show what they've got.

Kobayashi: Indeed.

(Hanyu falls on 4Lo)

Kobayashi: Oops...

(The standings after group 3 is on the screen)

Kobayashi: Now we are showing the current standings. Boyang Jin is currently in the 1st place.

(ISU President is on the screen)

Kobayashi: And this is ISU President Mr. Jan Dijkema.

(Nathan lands a 4Lz)

Okazaki: Quad Lutz.

(End of 6-minute warm-up)

Kobayashi: 6 minutes warm-up has ended.

(Hanyu goes back to the board doing shuuu-pa)

[worklabournewsresearch]

Work is More than a Paycheque

“Depression-era unemployment levels among young men in Alberta; 2,600 autoworkers out of work at the GM plant in Oshawa; hundreds of journalists across the country unemployed as the big machines at TorStar, Postmedia, Bell Media, and CBC cut jobs; 420 jobs lost at a smelter in New Brunswick. ... Unless the losses are in their community, politicians and other policy-makers don’t get too worried about news like this.”

“But national employment statistics are just one part of a larger picture. Income is not the only thing that disappears when a job is lost. A job is an identity. It’s a community. ... Unemployment takes a toll on physical and mental health, the stability of families, the educational and economic success of children, communities and the public as a whole. ... Much more needs to be done for those who are unable to acquire work for whatever reason – a disability, for instance, or because they no longer have the skills needed in a changing labour market. Why? Because not working has hidden and intangible costs for people. Unemployment takes a toll on physical and mental health, the stability of families, the educational and economic success of children, communities and the public as a whole.”

“The positive side of work is truly impressive. It has significant cognitive, psychological and physical benefits, sending beneficial ripples out into marriages, families and communities. Working people even tend to be bigger volunteers. As researchers Morley Gunderson and Rafael Gomez note ‘volunteering is not diminished by the compression of time related to long hours of work or by the fact that the spouse is on the job market or back to school. Busy families seem to do more of everything, including volunteering.’ But work with inconsistent hours and unpredictable schedules does make it harder to volunteer, the study shows.”

“[P]olicy interventions ... create obstacles to work for some people. Occupational licencing, for instance, raises the bar for entrance into certain professions (via training requirements and the attaining of credentials) and lowers the possibility of immigrants holding a credential-requiring job. Other licencing constraints can also work against newcomers. Minimum-wage policy can also prevent particular people from getting a job. ... Given the importance of work, could a public subsidy for a portion of that minimum wage allow more disabled individuals to enjoy the dignity of work? There are obvious challenges to any policy on this front – ensuring that such subsidies don’t drive down overall wages, for instance – but, given the benefits of work, taking on those challenges seems worthwhile.”

Policy Options, January 24, 2020: “Thinking of work as more than a paycheque,” by Brian Dijkema

Cardus, December 17, 2019: “Work is about more than money: Toward a Full Accounting of the Individual, Social, and Public Costs of Unemployment, and the Benefits of Work,” by Brian Dijkema and Morley Gunderson (download report or scroll down to read)

ResearchGate, December 2003: Volunteer Activity and the Demands of Work and Family, by Rafael Gomez and Morley Gunderson, Relations Industrielles / Industrial Relations 58(4)

ResearchGate, July 2015: Do Immigrants Gain or Lose by Occupational Licensing? by Rafael Gomez, Morley Gunderson, Xiaoyu Huang, Tingting Zhang Canadian Public Policy 41(Supplement 1):S80-S97

[worklabournewsresearch]

Labour Law and the Union Advantage

How will Ontario’s labour law changes affect unions?

“[U]nions’ political influence increases the distance between unions and workers at the shop level, causing workers to see the state, not unions, as the primary advocate for the protection of their rights. And this is a disease, maybe even the death knell, for the labour movement.”

“With even a cursory glance at the announced changes in labour law and regulations, it is clear that what is happening here is a massive, union-supported, outsourcing of the unions’ workplace functions to the province. Take wages, for instance. The Ontario Federation of Labour boasts that unionized workers make, on average, $6.42 more than their nonunion counterparts. Now, some of that difference is because wages in certain industries (i.e., public sector, health care, and construction) skew that number a bit. Even allowing for that skewed number and applying it unevenly to lowest paid workers, the increase in Ontario’s minimum wage from $11.40 to $15.00 will eat up more than half of that union advantage.”

“The same principle applies to the mandating of paid leave for sick days, or equal pay for equal work. These are things that unions can rightfully take to nonunionized workers to induce them to join their union. The fact that these are mandated across the board through labour law diminishes that union advantage.”

“It is both necessary and important that unions be involved in politics for them to be able to properly represent their workers. But, through this involvement, unions spend more of the social capital they derive from solidarity than they generate. And when that capital is spent on laws that make the social-capital-generating toil in workplaces redundant, the union movement becomes brittle, more susceptible to the vagaries of politics in a democracy, and less resilient.”

Policy Options, June 13, 2017: “How Ontario’s labour law changes will affect unions,” by Brian Dijkema

The union advantage in history

“In a new working paper, economists Brantly Callaway at Temple University and William J. Collins at Vanderbilt University examine the decades after the Great Depression, when economic inequality declined dramatically—and then stayed low for several decades after. They conclude that the simultaneous rise of unionization during this time ‘was not merely a coincidence.’”

City Lab, June 21, 2017: “To Reduce Urban Inequality, Reconsider Unions,” by Tanvi Misra

NBER Working Paper No. 23516, June 2017: “Unions, Workers, and Wages at the Peak of the American Labor Movement,” by Brantly Callaway, William J. Collins