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12
Mar
2017
You-know-who said he would bring jobs back to America. He can’t. Blaming free trade agreements misses the point. American jobs may have gone to lower-paid workers in Mexico, or China, or Bangladesh. But they won’t come back.
The missing jobs will be done by automated equipment. These robots don’t beep and squawk like R2D2 and C3P0. And no one would consider them loveable.
But they don’t get paid anything. They never go on strike, never take sick leave, never demand pension plans. They can work three shifts around the clock, if necessary, day after day.
And they make fewer mistakes than human workers do.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: taxes, robots, automation
9
The Christian churches in this part of the world are now one week into the season of Lent, starting on Ash Wednesday, March 1.
Few people pay attention to Lent anymore, it seems. Except that candy-makers start selling Easter eggs in supermarkets.
It wasn’t always so. When I was younger, churches taught us to give up something for the seven weeks leading to Easter. Like smoking, for example. Easy for me, because I didn’t smoke. Giving up chocolate would have been harder.
In my first fulltime job, the boss hired a stunning secretary. One March morning a rather ordinary looking woman replaced her.
“Who’s the new secretary?” I asked another staffer, cluelessly.
“Same one,” he said. “She’s just given up makeup for Lent.”
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Carnaval. Mardi Gras, Pancake Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Lent
5
During the depth of winter, when snow lay deep on the ground and arctic winds sucked warmth from bare skin, small groups of people from countries where snow is as unknown as poutine struggled across the world’s longest undefended border into Canada.
Illegally, of course.
Night after night, TV news showed video of these asylum seekers. Stumbling through snowdrifts, burdened by baby strollers or car seats. Dragging plastic suitcases. Huddled at a roadside, too numbed by bitter cold to go any farther.
They were greeted by police officers. Who led them gently to a warm car. Who helped carry their children. Who delivered them to a border immigration station, where kindly officials helped them fill out their applications to stay in Canada.
This is the Canada we imagine it to be. Compassionate. Decent. Hospitable.
Tags: immigrants, border patrol
1
No doubt you’ve heard that Douglas Garland was convicted of kidnapping, torturing, dismembering, and burning the bodies of five-year-old Nathan O’Brien and his grandparents Alvin and Kathy Liknes.
Garland, 57 years old, was sentenced to three consecutive 25-year terms of life imprisonment. Seventy-five years might seem sufficient punishment, but Nathan’s father wanted more – eternal punishment.
At the sentencing hearing, Rod O’Brien addressed Garland directly: “For those who choose evil, they will get an eternity of evil. A life sentence on earth is nothing compared to what waits for you.”
Having lost a son myself, many years ago, I can sympathize with the intensity of O’Brien’s grief. I hope his belief in hell – and in heaven for Nathan -- gives him comfort. It wouldn’t, for me.
Because I don’t believe in hell.
Tags: Hell, heaven, judgement