Past precedent
Re This War Has Gone On Long Enough. It’s Time To Negotiate With Mr. Hitler (Oct. 12): The Second World War does not provide the only, or necessarily the best, analogy to the war in Ukraine.
The First World War was a pointless horror, started and maintained by moribund empires determined to hold onto or expand power. As war raged, that none of the peace feelers put forward succeeded was tragic. Not only did millions of lives continue to be needlessly wasted, but the peace that was finally achieved left one side so unhappy that an even more horrific war resulted a generation later.
Let’s not be dismissive of ideas designed to end the mess in Ukraine soon.
Paul Edwards Calgary
We’re not gonna take it
Re The Young And The Pessimistic (Oct. 10): The young have every reason to be pessimistic, and to blame their parents for their plight.
Baby boomers, buoyed by safety nets put in place by their parents in reaction to the Great Depression and the Second World War, thrived through the 1950s and 1960s. They squandered this launchpad in the 1970s and 1980s with trickle-down economics and free markets as epitomized by Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher.
Now they claim not to understand why life is hard for their children, who are left bereft by the same forces that bankrupted their grandparents. If history is cyclical, capitalists will not voluntarily forgo extraordinary rents and windfall profit.
The next generation, and their boomer parents, should renounce the politics of marketization and instead vote for community-based policy. It would lower inequality via seriously progressive taxes and common wealth shared via free essential services such as education, health, pensions, social housing, etc.
Alan Ball New Westminster, B.C.
Most of the young people in my life are less than sanguine about their prospects, and for good reason. One party already feeds off that resentment and anger, and that’s Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
Mr. Poilievre is aiming his message of populist disruption squarely at young people who feel they’re being left behind. And as some polls are showing, more than a few of them are listening.
I just hope that the Liberal brain trust is thinking long and hard about that.
Neil Macdonald Toronto
As a young person in Canada, I remember worrying about affording a home as an adult when I was around 12 – I was odd like that. But in more recent months, these concerns seem to have been founded in reality. To approach adulthood is to approach independence. While a part of me is excited to be away from home, the other part is afraid of what that would entail.
It doesn’t help matters that minimum wage is no longer a liveable wage; even if one could save enough to afford a small apartment, it seems unlikely to me and my peers that our pay would be able to keep us in the apartment.
How much of my joys should I be willing to sacrifice in order to secure some quality of life?
Chidimma Aliozor Mississauga
Ancient purpose
Re ‘We Will Need To Find A New Possible’ (Opinion, Oct. 8): Ken Dryden attributes global warming to humanity’s possessive, unrestricted attitude toward nature. In his view, this attitude stems from the Bible giving man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth.” However, the same Bible orders man to “tend and keep” creation. A better translation of the Hebrew should read “cultivate and guard it.”
In my opinion, the Bible is balancing humanity’s duty to develop with the value of responsible stewardship over the earth’s resources.
Tzvi Aviv Toronto
Home sweet home
Re Why Remote Staff Are First To Go In Recession Layoffs (Report on Business, Oct. 8): There are people who wish to have a life of actual balance that includes their families. But no, they should endure soulless and lengthy commutes, five days a week, so they can toil in cubicles to keep their overlords happy. What nonsense.
The world has changed and companies that get it will thrive. Those that are punitive and treat employees like widgets will likely lose people. Progressive companies are developing all sorts of new work arrangements that actually consider what is best for employees.
That is what the future looks like, and our whole society will be the healthier and better for it.
Christopher White Whitby, Ont.
The phenomenon of “activist employees, whose personal preferences have hijacked corporate decision-making,” is hardly new. For more than a century, workers have been engaged with “corporate decision-making.” It’s called collective bargaining.
Now the engagement of workers is facilitated not only by the labour movement, but also by digital technologies that corporations have not only championed but are dependent on. If workers are using that same technology as a bargaining chip, no one should be surprised.
Business leaders will likely find out, to their peril, that removing the work-from-home choice only removes workers from such regressive employers.
We have lurched into a post-capitalist world where corporate leadership should focus on issues far more important than forcing workers to show up at a specific place, for a certain number of hours, when technology offers viable alternatives.
Paul Walton Nanaimo, B.C.
Send later
Re Why We Have The Right To Disconnect At Work (Pursuits, Oct. 8): Before sending that off-hours e-mail, consider if there is some overwhelmingly important reason that the recipient needs to receive this communication now, instead of during normal working hours. In most cases, the answer will be no.
On most platforms, there is a feature to time or delay the sending of e-mails. If enough people use this approach, it would result in a small flood of messages at the start of a workday.
This is good for two reasons: It demonstrates to employees the amount of time saved by disconnecting – and it documents for employers the amount of uncompensated work that employees were doing before disconnecting.
Dave Wortman Toronto
Toe the line
Re A Whole New Ball Game (Opinion, Oct. 8): AI umpires in baseball are not about the dehumanization of a beloved sport. I believe it’s about making the overwhelming power of online betting as reliable and beyond reproach as it can be.
Whatever the sport, on whichever surface it’s played, punters must be assured that payouts and losses are the result of player and coaching performance alone.
L.W. Naylor Stratford, Ont.
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