First up, Yahoo Finance:
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has declared a province-wide state of emergency as anti-vaccine mandate protests continue to block streets in Ottawa and access to the busiest border crossing in North America.
Ford announced the state of emergency at a press conference on Friday morning, and said cabinet will convene to enact orders "that will make it crystal clear it is illegal and punishable to block and impede the movements of goods, people and services along critical infrastructure."
Ford says the orders will be aimed at protecting international border crossings, 400-series highways, airports, ports, bridges and railways, as well as the safe movement of medical services, public transit, municipal and provincial roadways and pedestrian walkways. Fines for non-compliance "will be severe", Ford says, with a maximum fine of up to $100,000 and up to a year in prison....
....MUCH MORE
And one of the Yahoo Finance keyboard warriors:
Canada’s protesting truckers have morphed from enablers of capitalism to inhibitors of it. You could just call them jerks. Everybody’s sick of COVID and many are now growing fearful of runaway inflation. What nobody needs is a bunch of anarchists shutting down businesses and triggering new levels of disruption. Yet by the metrics of value destruction, the Canadian protests have been so successful at shuttering Ottawa businesses and halting U.S.-Canada trade that dead-enders may now attempt similar economic sabotage in the United States and elsewhere.
Do the truckers have legitimate grievances? Honestly, who cares....MORE
Which reminded me of the Teamsters strike. I'm not sure the guy at the keyboard understands truckers. Here's how the Teamsters reacted to stress in 1934, the management guy heading for terra firma died almost instantly of a crushed occipital lobe.
And a warning to the truck drivers from 2016:
"As Tech Evaporates Jobs, “The Tipping Point Will Be Driverless Trucks”"
And 2013:
Dear Teamsters, United Auto Workers: Google Is Trying To Crush Your Unions and Your Members (GOOG)
Yup, the powers that be understand raw power and understand the truckers have some:
Logistics: "Shutting It All Down: The Power of General Strikes in U.S. History"For the last month* I've been pondering the optimal bet should a general strike interrupt transport into major urban centers.
Urban Complexity and Fragility
Sometimes people forget where their food comes from and who it is they should thank for their daily sustenance.
One of the things a risk manager is tasked with is catastrophizing possible futures and developing plans to either mitigate or hopefully, profit from the worst case scenario. Most of our readers are familiar with the more dramatic scenarios: Tokyo earthquake at magnitude 8.5 - 9.5. An electromagnetic pulse, whether caused by a coronal mass ejection or an airburst of a nuclear weapon, an underwater landslide on the order of the Storegga slide creating a megatsunami, etc. These are the better known risks.
But one of the more mundane risks is something like a general strike....
Some of the politician types should read a little more labor history and stop cashing so many of big tech's big checks.
