Greg Bechtel

I write things. My first story collection was published by @fhbooks, and I'm currently seeking a publisher for my completed first novel, while writing the next.

[Dan Dowhal @DanDowhal]

Please join me next Thursday 18 June at 7 p.m. upstairs at KIAC Dënäkär Zho for the official launch of my new book, Sled Doug. There will also be a set of dog songs by special musical guest Joey O'Neil and some dog poetry. Everyone welcome. Thank you @klondikebooks

[The Breakdown @TheBreakdownAB]

“Alberta's privacy commissioner says putting personal health numbers (PHN) and citizenship markers on driver's licences pose new risks to the protection of personal information in the province, including fraud.”

#abpoli #ableg #cdnpoli https://t.co/6PGSlSSiso

[Greg Bechtel @GBechtelWriter]

It's rare that I see a post on here that I agree with 100%, no caveats. This is one of them.

[The Breakdown @TheBreakdownAB]

On last nights open mic we got into Supervised Consumption Sites and the opioid crisis.

And unfortunately, we had someone show up making some pretty gross comments.

But bring that to our open mics and it will get dealt with!

#abpoli #ableg #cdnpoli

[Courtney Theriault @cspotweet]

"That consent has not been sought. It has not been given. Nor will it be given under duress or through any process designed to circumvent our constitutional rights."

Treaty 8 First Nations Chiefs send letter to Premier Danielle Smith, as well as Prime Minister Mark Carney, demanding the Alberta government immediately cease any attempt to proceed with a separation referendum or related process without full consultation, accommodation and the free, prior, and informed consent of the Treaty 8 First Nations.

[Luke Savage @LukewSavage]

What if, call me crazy, we introduced a wealth tax instead

[CanadaWill 🇨🇦 @CanadaWillPrj]

This is amazing! Try and pin a Canadian flag on Danielle. Haha. Made my day. #ableg

[Candas Jane Dorsey @CJDwriter]

They knew this stuff in 2020 and instead of pulling the plug, they fired the person who warned them. A fascinating long message about large language models' fallability.

[Stephanie J. Lahey, PhD 🇨🇦 @SJLahey]

Yes, I have read every single source I’ve ever cited. I was explicitly taught that if you have not read it, you should not cite it, and I maintain that those who taught me thus were correct.

[Courtney Theriault @cspotweet]

Current Alberta mood:

[Andrew Coyne 🇺🇦🇮🇱🇬🇪🇲🇩 @acoyne]

Imagine that. Turns out you can’t lawfully hold a referendum on whether to take something that isn’t yours: like land covered by treaties, or the sovereign territory of Canada.

[Bev 🇨🇦 @Garnet_2203]

You can’t tell me it’s not all related.

Separatists groups somehow gets a hold of electoral lists.

The thought is the Republican Party of Alberta which was the first fucking flag gave them the list!

[cbcwatcher @cbcwatcher]

CBC, that really should have been all over this leaked Alberta 2.5M person voter list story, gets schooled by Jen Gerson of the Line

"Right now we have... Elections Alberta blaming the scope of the legislation for their inability to investigate for more than a, for several weeks after they were warned."

"We've got the government throwing Elections Alberta under the, under the bus and we've got the separatists all turning on each other over this. So it's been quite a day."

"...it really would have taken a proper investigator maybe 15 minutes to be able to determine whether or not the thing I had flagged was the voter file or not." @jengerson @the_lineca

[Avi Lewis @avilewis]

1/ Today’s spring economic statement fails to meet the moment at a time when Canadians are getting crushed by the rising cost of everything.

While it was sold by the government as a plan to address affordability, the update contains virtually no new measures to bring down the cost of living — it tinkers around the edges and re-announces existing initiatives.

Meanwhile, there’s not a single new measure to bring in new revenue by taxing excessive corporate profits.

[Greg Bechtel @GBechtelWriter]

@TheBreakdownAB "Our office in Tokyo"? I mean, maybe I'm missing something here, but why exactly does the Government of Alberta have (or need) an office in Tokyo?

[Fred Stenson @fstenson]

David Shepherd, ABNDP is exactly right. To try to eliminate Lethbridge's NDP-held riding, UCP is merging Lethbridge with rural ridings (affecting 4 ridings). This was the subject of my AB Views (Jan/Feb) column. You can check it out at https://t.co/zvPkiNXcye.

[The Breakdown @TheBreakdownAB]

Some of the changes with Bill 25 are…

Something.

A wide range of perspectives and ideas on facts?

And apparently there shall be no conversations about how unions came to be in Canada, how access to abortion happened, Louis Reil or Oka.

#abpoli #ableg #cdnpoli

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

About half of all jobs in capitalist economies are considered pointless and unproductive, i.e., they are socially useless, according to the people who hold them.

David Graeber argues that this is by design. In his book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Graeber posited that the ruling class believes that if ordinary people have both enough free time and material security, it would inevitably lead to a social revolution.

Graeber refers to the 1960s in the United States, when the abovementioned condition was met, albeit briefly. During these few years, housing, healthcare and higher education were affordable, workers’ unions were strong, and gains from production and technology actually translated to security for the majority.

As a result, people had time on their hands. They used this time to engage in something very dangerous: thinking.

According to Graeber, many young people were being relieved of the need to worry about survival, which allowed them to start asking questions and to organise to change the world. This was the ultimate nightmare of the ruling classes. So, they reacted by deliberately creating a world based on work discipline.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes had predicted that by 2030, people would be working 15 hours a week. Graeber explains that the reason we didn’t get anywhere close to the 15-hour workweek predicted by Keynes is that the gains from productivity were diverted into creating administrative hierarchies.

Graeber wrote that “Rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector…It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”

Millions of people hold jobs in which they are being paid to do nothing, but for that very reason, they are kept under constant surveillance and control. This explains why people feel busy but feel it is unnecessary.

This is neoliberalism, which, to Graeber, was a project of political control, rather than an economic efficiency project, to keep people busy in a world that no longer needed their labour as much as it used to.

To Graeber, a population that depends on meaningless work for survival is easier to govern than one with time to reflect.

This is because surveillance-heavy, low-autonomy jobs are training grounds for obedience, where work becomes a moral credential without contributing meaningfully to anything.

This helps explain why unemployment is somehow stigmatised even when jobs are useless, overwork is celebrated even when it destroys health, and why automation is resisted even when it could reduce toil.

In summation, modern capitalism no longer needs most people’s labour, but it still needs their compliance, and that’s what work has become.

[Andrea Dekeseredy @AndieWinnipeg]

New documents show while the University of Alberta was under mass budget cuts that resulted in layoffs and a 100% cut to child care funding, the president was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on travel

Expenses have doubled since he took office

https://t.co/SqeLFHd0yp

[Greg Bechtel @GBechtelWriter]

@RHAlexander @SnowOrDeath @doctorow Where by "income," I mean actual labour, rather than parasitizing the labour of others.

[Greg Bechtel @GBechtelWriter]

@RHAlexander @SnowOrDeath @doctorow ...like the rest of us poor working shmucks.