Ten things we can do without

Sixty foot boats powered by six outboard motors, for one thing! That's just effing stupid.

Maybe we can leave behind a few other stupidities as well.

Let's hope this crisis will be the death knell for mass tourism. Packing planes full of yobs and depositing them in Mykonos or Ibiza for a week of drunken assholery is an aspect of globalism that's hard to justify.

The Olympics. They've been postponed for a year. Let's postpone them forever. The celebration of amateur sport has morphed into a corporate feeding frenzy. It's not about sport anymore; it's about TV ratings, the glorification of corporate sponsors, and winning at any and all costs.

Professional sports. In my lifetime, professional athletes have gone from guys who made a few bucks playing a game during the season to guys who expect millions per year. Up until the sixties, most professional athletes took a real job in the off-season.

Fast food chains. They've pretty much all got the same business model; pay their workers as little as possible, source their ingredients as cheaply as possible, and make the management clique and the shareholders as rich as possible.

Factory farming. What's so tasty about eating pork or chicken from a living creature that never saw a ray of sunshine in its short and miserable life?

Walmart. Nobody's driven more family retail businesses out of business than Walmart. In a grim irony, during this crisis Walmart remains open while the few remaining small businesses on main street are forced to close.

Bitumen mining. Canada's feminist PM has allocated billions in bail-out money to the purveyors of the world's dirtiest oil. With the political will it's a no-brainer to put the construction workers building out the oilsands to work on something socially and economically useful.

Fracking. Another no-brainer. Let's pump poison deep into the earth to force out that reluctant oil and gas. The fact that we get our water from that same earth doesn't seem to bother these people. We can live a lot longer without oil than we can without water.

Billionaires. When I was a kid there were two billionaires in the world; KC Irving and the Sultan of some island in the Pacific that was blessed with an abundance of bird-shit that he sold to giant agro-businesses as fertiliser. Now there's thousands of them. If they could stay out of sight and busy themselves counting their money, they might be tolerable, but they don't. Instead, once they know they've got enough squirrelled away in off-shore tax havens to keep their children and grandchildren in country houses and Bentleys in perpetuity, they tend to dabble in politics. This tends to be disastrous for non-billionaires.

America's "democracy" is all the proof you need.