One of the problems with democracy is needing to compete on promises to voters every few years. One reason I'm a monarchist, but that's a whole other issue.

My European relatives manage with smaller houses and smaller - or no - cars. North Americans would see that as sacrifice; they see North American houses and cars as absurd excess.

Then there's the MAPLE reactors fiasco. I had a chance to visit the facility before it went live, and building design problems were obvious, but the real issue was "the MAPLE reactors were not behaving the way the model predicted, and no one knew why." thetyee.ca/News/2009/06...

Technological progress is good but often an excuse for doing less or avoiding even modest sacrifices. For example, making cars more efficient is nowhere near as effective as more transit use. Technology won't save us from over-consumption. As for nuclear power... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_...

Date most recently accessed (because you confirmed those old links just before submitting).

In fairness to online marketplaces, much of what I buy from them is what I used to buy from shady little shops in downtown Toronto, or newspaper classifieds, so not sure that's new competition.

To be honest, when I say "some years ago" or "a few years ago," I'm usually referring to the 1980s, which was ... (cool, pocket calculators are built into phones now) forty years ago.

Some years ago, Chrysler had a series of commercials on the theme of "Everyone needs a minivan." Same idea, but much better execution (because a minivan carries many things better than a truck - as I often witnessed at Home Depot while loading up my minivan).

Life in a state of freedom is nasty, brutish, and short (with apologies to Thomas Hobbes).

"You do not expect to see dead animals in the open. It is the nature of animals to die alone, off somewhere, hidden. It is wrong to see them lying out on the highway; it is wrong to see them anywhere." Lewis Thomas - Death in the Open. www.tumblr.com/biologywatch...