Over the next coupla weeks I’ll be reassessing my goals with the blog - regular writing on interesting topics - and determining what topic corral I can manage to keep up on, and will relaunch the blog with more pithy witticisms that are sometimes viewed as fascist.  The aim will to be to build a more focused topic set that will resonate with people more easily.

Thanks to everyone that checked in!

Pasta. From a post to Curious Capitalist you can learn about the Pasta Index and the currently fabulous fortunes of the American Italian Pasta company.  Decent pasta is reasonably healthy and costs much less than the food stuffs it’s replacing.  From a Reuters article American Italian has done nicely the last bit:

Retail revenue for the quarter rose 56 percent to $136.1 million, primarily helped by higher average selling prices, the producer and marketer of dry pasta in North America said.

Library Books. This one isn’t surprising.  As people become cash constrained they buy less and borrow more.  Library lending is up all over the US as unemployment increases.  A regional library network near Denver reports:

…a 25.3 percent increase in cardholders in 2008.

Love. From Marginal Revolution comes a post about how love is counter cyclical. (I’m a bit loathe to suggest “inferior” given the negative connotation.)  The NY Times reports:

Match.com … had its strongest fourth quarter in the last seven years, and … Amy Laurent International, a matchmaking service with outposts in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, say business is up 40 percent among women over the last four months.

Church Attendance: More people are showing up at churches around North America.  This is not necessarily good for the offering plate since people are on average giving less.  From local paper in Santa Clarita:

“But volunteerism and mass attendance are certainly on the rise,” said Parish Business Manager Renee Fields. “With an increase in numbers, you would expect an increase in funds or if anything to stay stagnant but to start seeing a decline (in funds) we know that it is the economy.”

Now all of this makes sense since when under stress, especially about the future, people tend to concentrate on fairly basic things, like comfort and money (as a provider of food, shelter, safety).

Taking this a step futher, intangible things, like the environment, tend to get ignored since they provide only intangible benefits to individuals and families.  So over the next while, see policy makers decide to talk about environmental issues but not provide a lot of money for them, and see donations to environmental causes drop over the next while.

The report says the energy industry should be required “to use best available technology” that is “economically achievable.”  The fine print doesn’t cast much more light when it explains that this “refers to technology that can achieve superior performances and has been demonstrated to be economically feasible.”

Economically, such vague statements should be interpreted as advocating extremely uncertain outcomes, since available technology and costs are very difficult (if not impossible) to predict.  If they actually advocate this idea as policy it means that they should mandate an acceptable rate of return on oilsands projects and hold companies to it.  If so, then companies will have a very clear benchmark to compare to projects in other jurisdictions.

Even though they’re not well loved by the public right now, Ed and Mel should hire an economist.  Not even for policy making but - kind of like experts do for technical subjects in films - at least critique the ideas so that the government doesn’t come off sounding incredibly stupid when they open their mouths.  At minimum they should have someone with slight acumen that can determine what pronouncements add to economic uncertainty and which ones do not.

Social Workers: Harry Chase, the Liberal MLA for Calgary-Varsity, is calling for a review of the wages for social workers or other human resource support staff doing contract work for the province. “What I’m calling for is equal pay for equal work,” he says. According to his research, a social worker hired by the government makes almost double the wage earned by those doing contract work.

My first reaction was that Harry Chase was on the case, looking for fat, examining what looks like high bureaucrat/employee salaries during a time of fiscal contract and uncertainty.  If a contractor is willing to do the work for half the price, it would seem that the equivalent employee is making too much money.  This logic is used when comparing salaries across industries, regions and roles, so it certainly can apply here.  I fully support a review to see if salaries are too high.

Given the source, Mr. Chase is very likely looking to further inflate the Alberta Government payroll.

But, I have to admit, the pork and uncertainty (read: ineptitude) show run by Ed Stelmach, Mel Knight and crew vastly overshadows any negative effects that Chase’s salary equalization plan would have.

Their objective in the study:

We investigate the relationship between first name popularity and juvenile delinquency to test the hypothesis that unpopular names are positively correlated with crime.

The two sentence summary:

The distribution of first names in the state’s population is different from the names of juvenile delinquents. Our results show that unpopular names are positively correlated with juvenile delinquency for both blacks and whites.

They add, noting the correlation between socio-economic status of parents and the giving of lousy names:

First, as documented in the literature, parents of low socioeconomic status are more likely to give their children unpopular names, and a large theoretical literature links children living in low socioeconomic households with juvenile delinquency.

They quote this painful conclusion for those with kids named unusually, also providing their own interpretation.

Mehrabian and Piercy (1993) find that persons with unconventionally spelled names are perceived by others to have undesirable characteristics in terms of popularity, morality, warmth, and success. … …juveniles with unpopular names may be more prone to crime because they are treated differently by their peers, making it more difficult for them to form relationships.

So the simplest conclusion that you can make is that if you are of a low socio-economic status (read: poor) it would behoove you to provide your child with a good start by not giving them a crappy name.  If you’re not poor, you might again want to think twice about giving your kids strange names regardless - just to be safe.

If this is solidly true then the Swedes might have experienced a better adjusted society since they used to aggressively legislate approved names.  Now that this seems to be changing will Stockholm start to look like Alabama?

Thanks to the crew at Freakonomics for the link.

Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances from 1964-2004, we find that birth-cohorts that have experienced high stock market returns throughout their life report lower risk aversion, are more likely to be stock market participants, and, if they participate, invest a higher fraction of liquid wealth in stocks.

To summarize, people who grew to adulthood during the depressions of the 30s and the 70s exhibit significantly lower participation in equities and other (greater than zero risk) financial instruments than those maturing at other times.

The study is in aggregate, meaning that it doesn’t analyse specific individual behaviour so it doesn’t determine what mitigating actions people can take to alter their financial risk tolerance.

I reached the age examined in the study (36-43) during the crash of 01/02 and the recent financial ass-kicking.  Does this mean that I’ll become stable with higher risk aversion than those born before or after me?  Not sure.  Likely the best prescription to counteract the high or the low risk tolerance of your specific generation would be to become economically literate, from an early age - not necessarily so that you become an expert forecaster, but so that you can determine when the forecasts of others are likely to be complete crap and react accordingly.

The gang over at Freakonomics suggest that parents might want to avoid talking about the financial crises with their kids because of the evidence of the study.  Given the age range that the researchers worked through and the correlations they saw, talking to kids that aren’t age of majority isn’t likely to affect their future attitudes, unless of course you’re one those tiring boring parents that yammer like a broken record about only one topic well into your children’s 40s.

Thanks to the Economist for the link.

Comparing subjects who had substantial uninterrupted sleep with those that had equal amounts of sleep but were prodded away periodically, recall of images day over day was significantly impacted.  Given scans of the hippocampus, their study suggests that instead of merely affecting recall it’s more likely encoding of memories is significantly affected by sleep quality.  So the better your sleep, the more your brain will store for later retrieval.

While the concept of improved mental performance after good sleep isn’t overly original, evidence that it impairs storage of memories rather than recall, is fairly novel.

Thanks to the BPS blog for the link.

Using weather as a proxy for mood, what they found was those who were quizzed when the weather was bright and sunny - i.e. exhibiting a good mood - were less able to recall items that were easily seen within the shop.  Those that were questioned during lousy weather - i.e. in a bad mood - were much more able to recall the unusual planted objects from the store.

So does this study show that people are more distracted during times of good mood, or does it mean that people in a good mood are more forgetful?  Does sunlight, and it’s varying affects on the human body cause distraction or memory loss, or is enhanced mood the only factor?  The quick description of the study doesn’t make it clear what they determined.

Either way, you could interpret this as simply as studying for a test in a dark, dreary, but comfortable enough place will enhance your ability to recall.  So if you take this to the extreme, make sure you or your kids are slightly annoyed when it’s important to cognitively excel for a specific task.  Likely too, when you’re out shopping or signing contracts make sure that you’re not too damn happy (or sunlit) - you’ll be less likely to forget important details about prices, rules and clauses.

A study was recently published by Sophie Labrecht, Lara J. Pierce, Michael J. Tarr and, James W. Tanaka, from Brown University and the University entitled “Perceptual Other-Race Training Reduces Implicit Racial Bias“.  The team attempted to:

…examine the relationship between these two biases, we trained Caucasian subjects to better individuate other-race faces and measured implicit racial bias for those faces both before and after training.

They did this by showing a series of images showing the faces of a variety of people of African ancestry to two groups - one that merely had to identify race and the other instead were prompted to differentiate between specific facial characteristics across all photos.  What they found was people who were trained to discriminate amongst features within a group exhibited less racial bias than the control group that did not receive any detailed training.

Taking this into the economic behaviour realm, this implies that without explicit and deliberate exposure to people of other races (read: skin colours, facial features etc.) individuals and those organizations they work for are likely to have reduced effectiveness in economic dealings.  If you’re unable to see people of a particular racial group as individuals you’ll be unable to deal with them effectively, reducing the shared utility of any interaction and making it less likely that such transactions will be repeated.  So there are a couple of things to take away here.  If you run a business or do trade in a non-homogenous community, it is well worth your organization’s while to learn to differentiate between customers of other races, as it will reduce bias and very likely improve your customer relationships.  For those of you with children it suggests that regular exposure to people of differring races will help them function better in a heavily globalized world, where cross-cultural connections are moving in new directions all the time.  The better they can differentiate faces, the more empathy they’re likely to have and the more easily they will adapt.

Now if this finding is to be quite effective, then it’s important that someone develop related training or educational materials that can be used widely.  Of course, whoever does will step in a racial debate minefield that would likely be discouraging.

This is also presents a strong case against ghettoization and segregation.  If people in a multi-cultural country like Canada or the US tend to group together racially and culturally they will continue to have functional biases against those that look different than them reducing their economic prospects and those of their children.  It’s also become much easier since internal support segregation can be enhanced by satiating on culturally biased media - easily available via the internet and 500 cable channel feeds.

Of course if you’re strident you’ll miss the cool point of the whole paper - the potential for simple and effective cultural development - and instead focus on the ugly use of the word and idea of races.

Thanks to the BPS Research Digest Blog for the link.

Please also note, that in line with Government Policy, with regard to educational seminars, you are entitled to deduct 200% as a company expense.

My gut said that it was a poorly conceived subsidy intended to help improve the professional education level of Thais.  Of course my first reaction was to see if the training sessions we run for our office staff and guides could take advantage of this new break.  While the marginal tax rate is low it’s important to use the tax code to your advantage when possible (and legal of course).  I figured that given the extreme break that it would create unintended consequences or incentives that would be well beyond what the framers of the new law conceived.

Within a few weeks of the announcement I was proven correct.  It turns out that this break includes rental on conference facilities - including those small meeting rooms in hotels.  So some folks in Thailand are now forgoing office space, and when needed, merely renting meeting rooms and getting a significantly better tax break on it.  So a training subsidy has now easily been turned into a reduction in rent, likely affecting office landlords around the country.

If you continue to watch this one unfold I suspect that you’ll see some office buildings convert themselves into conference centres with meeting breakout rooms that look a lot like private offices.  Ancillary affects could also include increased purchases of notebook computers, and the services of companies and consultants that help turn the most un-educational meeting look like a training session.  Of course following all of this, the government will figure out that the law is being used as they did not intend.  And, instead of repealing or fixing the provisions in the law, they will create an investigation team to track down abusers, creating headlines that the government can use to show that they’re cracking down on corruption.  It’ll be great.

The general industry concensus is that Alberta is unattractive due to very low netbacks (prices less costs, i.e. net prices), which translates into relatively lower land purchase values, lower investment (in drilling and related construction) rates, and through that a significant drop in the use of oilfield services.  This means that whole portions of the industry are poised to bleed jobs.  And, all because of exceptionally poor margins.

What does the economically inept Alberta government do?  They realize that the whole ARF updates were a mistake - surprisingly never thinking that oil (or even gas) prices would drop to where it is today.  They then scramble to do a patch update (Transitional Royalties) hoping that it’ll take the sting off of the “tough decisions” that they feel they had to do in 2007.  And then further, yesterday, they obtusely talk about incenting the smaller producers to do more activity in the province, but are fairly adamant that it’s not going to be a royalty reduction, instead it’ll be some sort of tax incentive or who knows.

Since the problem in the patch is that netbacks  in Alberta are too low for a variety of reasons - due to low commodity prices, higher relative royalties, higher operating and capital costs - you’d think that they’d tackle the core of the issue, i.e. help producers increase or realize a higher net price.  Tax incentives (possibly better capital depreciation rates, or investment credits, or whatever) are not going to change the fact that even once drilled a lot of wells cannot be economically produced.  Only if the government starts to hand out cash to drill new wells - a poor idea since fiscal stimuli are generally poorly conceived and

Are these guys incapable of doing basic math?  It’s like they’ve never seen a cash flow report before.

At this stage with very low net prices, the Alberta government may not have many economic tools to make things look better, but their choice of attempting to affect after tax income rather than the core of the problem (low netbacks) shows that they are likely to continue to screw things up.

1. Trade with Cuba
The trade embargo has allowed a despot to drive his country into abject poverty, and kill thousands.  Trade will increase - and would have increased - the influence of outside ideas, including ideas of fundamental freedoms that would help Cubans push Fidel and his mafia out of power.

2. Remove Iran from the Axis of Evil list
Before Bush and co. created the Axis of Evil, Iran was marching solidly towards a new enlightenment, with a blossoming of creative media, fostering the start of openess with the world.  Adding them to the list helped put a warmongering mouthpiece in power and increased the danger to Iran’s burgeoning middle-class and it’s geographical neighbours.  Without a large enemy that can be used by the Supreme Council to oppress Iranians, some openess should re-emerge.

3. Legalize Marijuana
Skipping the obvious improvements that such a move would bring (e.g. fewer people in prison), relaxing of marijuana laws would reduce future crime and bring a huge business segment into the main stream market, increasing employment and available tax base.  It would also allow close allies, i.e. Canada, to finally do the same.

4. Work to improve the lot of Mexicans in Mexico
If the US spent a fraction of their Iraq war, helping to reduce corruption, improve economic investment and reduce risk (read some de Soto), it would do more to lower illegal immigration than any network of walls.  It would also improve general incomes of Mexicans, which in turn will help improve the environment, health, and life expectancy.

5. Extend NAFTA
Protectionism is not conducive to economic growth.  The US, instead of turtling in, should extend their openess - to not just improve American incomes but those of their trading partners.  It should be true free trade, not tied pseudo aid/investment that mostly passes for help, but an openess that increases opportunities the world over.

The Canadian Federal Government recently (last week) brought down the new budget.  In it there seemed to be something for everyone, and like in the US it’ll take us, federally, deep into deficit* territory.  Taking a look at the budget I’m going to outline the case against the new programs and going into deficit at this time.

1. They don’t really know what will work

• Throwing out dozens of new initiatives smacks of desperation, not solid economic sense.  In the end the economy will improve and someone in the government will take credit for fixing it, even though they will have no idea what, if any, of their programs made a difference.
• The best way to get the economy moving is to improve confidence, which will improve investor risk profiles, loosen credit, get people spending again, and generate profits.  Since this massive increase in spending smacks of fear (of a poor economy and an unwanted election), it’s not likely to even have a placebo affect on confidence.
• An analogy from the NY Times (extended by Greg Mankiw) states:

Doctors who spent more - on extra tests or high-tech treatments, for instance - didn’t get better results than their more conservative colleagues. In many cases, patients of the aggressive doctors stay sicker longer and die sooner because of the risks that come with invasive care.  …  Just like economics!

• Small stimuluses have a solid track record of not working, so a large collection of small stimuluses is likely to fare just as well.
• Keynes himself is quoted as saying that that public projects are not very good remedies to combat the business cycle.  If everyone believes that Keynes is purely about spending nations out of crisis they should do more research.

2. The deficit amount is much higher than likely needed to stay in power

This projected budget, carrying it’s cumulative deficit of around $90 billion is certainly well below what the Liberals would have been comfortable propping up.  Michael Ignatieff has no interest in precipitating an election as he knows that there is nothing for the Liberal Party to gain from such a move.  Hence they could have gotten away with less.   The Conservatives cannot really blame the Liberals for the size of the budget.

3. You can’t spend that much more money quickly and efficiently

The government may have budgeted for a significant increase in public works, but either the money will take a very long time to be properly allocated (a US report as an example) or an inordinate amount of it will be wasted as was done with the huge spending hyperactivity in Iraq over the course of the current conflict.  You really can’t have it both ways.  Since our current government bureaucracy is tooled to deliver the current (2008) amount of largesse for projects, any significant increase will require increased bureaucrats (rarely a good thing), or the money will be sent out the door without adequate checks and balances.

4. It will increase national debt and associated costs

Currently (@ 2008) the Canadian federal debt is running at about 29.9% of GDP, and takes up about 13.6% of Federal Government revenue to service.

With an announced $89.4 billion in cumulative deficits over the next few years this will increase federal debt to $541 billion and increase debt servicing costs to approximately $16 billion per year.  This means that by the end of this cycle of stimulation, the government will be paying almost $500 per capita every year on debt servicing with a per capita debt of $16,300 or about $65,000 for a family of four.  And those numbers don’t include the huge debt burden that the provinces and municipalities have to pay.

This money will need to be paid sometime and will continue to reduce the amount of money that can be returned to taxpayers via tax breaks or program spending.

This said, there is a very real chance that things won’t go as planned - like things changed radically in late 2008 - meaning that the deficit projection stands a very real chance of not coming out at the level budgeted for.

5. General problems with Canadian government spending

• None of the new spending seems to be related to long term improvement of personal asset/wealth generation, the base driver of the economy.
• There is little evidence that much redistribution of wealth, i.e. increased taxation and transfers, actually improves the lot (read: happiness) of people.
• Increases in government size directly erode the incentive for individuals to be charitable on their own, instead letting them coast on the highly inefficient government wealth transfers.
• Increases in transfer payments continue to reward jurisdictions that are incapable of creating an economic climate conducive to personal wealth creation.

The one current bonus in this whole thing is that the failure of the coalition and the current budget has really pissed off the economically feckless NDP.

——————–

* A little bit of background:

• deficit generally applies to a net government borrow in a specific time period.
• The national debt is the net accumulated deficit at any point in time - i.e. the amount of cash that the government (i.e. you) owe to our various lenders.
• The national debt is different than net national debt - net national debt also includes the value of any assets, including property and securities, held by the federal government.  Not a very useful number since the value of the assets, especially right now, is in serious flux.

It’s like no-one pictured oil at less than $50/bbl when the Stelmach crew trotted out the updated royalty program, designed by a retired forest executive turned environmentalist and his panel.  The whole problem with the new regime was obtusely acknowledged by the government when they bolted on a transitional royalty equation set that is supposed to provide for relief in low price periods.  But, instead of consulting industry and clearly determining the follow on affects on investment, and comparing Alberta’s structure to those in Saskatchewan and BC, the government decided to move ahead anyway.

The mandate of the new royalties was emphatically stated as: increase the government take by $1-2 billion per year.  This was regardless of the affect that this would have on investment in projects, employment in service industries and the income tax take.  Ed Stelmach and Mel Night have seemingly bought into the idea, continually trumpeted by propagandists like Andrew Nikiforuk, that prosperity of a jurisdiction is almost soley determined by the amount of money the government taxes away from its citizens and their businesses.

So what are the follow on affects?  First, Saskatchewan and BC take in more cash in land (mineral rights) sales than Alberta - both of whom have significantly less coverage in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) than Alberta, and both of whom have, until recently, shown themselves to be much more hostile to the oil business.  Second, well before prices for light crude had fallen to less than $50US, the investment in new petroleum drilling and mining projects in Alberta was off by billions - which in turn idled drilling crews, emptied regional hotels and cut the income of most every construction project outside of Calgary, Edmonton and Red Deer, cutting significantly into the tax base.  Much of the investment ended up jumping over the border.  Third, with the price dropping to recent lows the government stands to bring in less than under the old royalty program - Alberta Energy noted that the turning point was at an oil price was $45/bbl (with gas’ threshold at just over $6/GJ), meaning that its plan for scooping a fair share stands a very real chance of not happening.

So then the new program isn’t adequately doing what any of the players in the Alberta oil patch would like.  The government likely gets less through lower royalties with current lower (but certainly not low) prices.  Companies that employ and act as investments for Albertans move billions across the border to invest in more attractive regions.  People who are employed by the oil companies and their service cohort lose their jobs or make less money.  The government again grabs less through lower profits on corporations and with rising unemployment on relatively high wage jobs will take in noticeably less in personal income taxes. Then oil prices drop and the government, who spends more per capita than any provincial jurisdiction in Canada, finds itself facing an operating deficit.

And, all of this seems to be because Stelmach, Knight and the rest of the gang couldn’t picture oil at less than $50/bbl, and deem government take as the benchmark for prosperity.

Maria D. Fitzpatrick suggests:

For disadvantaged children residing in small towns and rural areas, Universal Pre-K availability increases both reading and mathematics test scores at fourth grade as well as the probability of students being on-grade for their age.

But she goes on to say that other demographic groups didn’t see the same level of improvement.  Given the group described it would seem that the opportunity for socialization, likely very reduced for disadvantaged rural children, would be the biggest benefit.

David M. Welsch & David M. Zimmer find that:

children who are likely to receive after-school adult supervision from a family member possess unmeasured personal- or family-specific traits that induce improved cognitive performance. In contrast, children who are likely to receive supervision from nonfamily members possess unmeasured traits that lead to lower cognitive outcomes.

This suggests that care delivered by trusted and familiar individuals is likely to create a more relaxed environment where extra learning is more easily achieved.

• Sugar causes hyperactivity in children
• Suicides increase over the holidays
• Poinsettia toxicity
• Excess heat loss in the hatless

The first I’ve known for a while, but it’s refreshing to have a few more tidbits available for debate when the need arises.

In a prior post by the same authors the following, among others, have also been quickly debunked:

• People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
• Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
• Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals

Here, using classical methods of developmental psychology, we show that children who are monolingual speakers of two Australian languages with very restricted number vocabularies possess the same numerical concepts as a comparable group of English-speaking indigenous Australian children.

So it would seem that within children there is an ability to recognize numbers, even when the language is not available to describe it - allowing the researchers to conclude that there is a basic ability that is not affected by cultural bias.

Dwight R Lee’s article entitled Should Government Reduce Inequality in Life Spans? with such swell quotes as:

Government transfers to reduce the gender gap in life expectancy would do little more than reduce improvements in both women’s and men’s life expectancies. For similar reasons, government transfers have done little more than reduce the income growth of both the rich and the poor.

Scott Hankins, Mark Hoestra and Paige Marta Skiba in their paper The Ticket to Easy Street? The Financial Consequences of Winning the Lottery, show:

Our results show that while recipients of $50,000 to $150,000 are less likely to …file for bankruptcy immediately following the receipt of the cash prize, this reduction represents a mere postponing of bankruptcy as it is followed by an increase in bankruptcy rates three to …ve years after winning.  Consequently, we …nd no di¤erence between the overall bankruptcy rates of small winners versus large winners in the 6 years after winning the lottery.

Michael Anderson and David A. Matsa determine the causality direction of restaurant availability and obesity, in their paper Are Restaurants Really Supersizing America? finding:

Well-established cross-sectional and time-series correlations between average body weight and eating out have convinced many researchers and policymakers that restaurants are a leading cause of obesity in the United States. … The results find no evidence of a causal link between restaurants and obesity, and the estimates are precise enough to rule out any meaningful effect.

C. Kirabo Jackson and Emily Greene Owens do research on the correlation between DUIs and availability of public transit in a paper entitled One for the Road: Public Transportation, Alcohol Consumption, and Intoxicated Driving, showing:

We find that each additional hour of late-night operation reduced the total number of DUIs in Washington DC by 9%, and this effect was concentrated in areas where alcohol venders are located close to Metro stations. In contrast, we find evidence that alcohol consumption increased with the service expansion as the number of alcohol-related arrests went up by as much as 14% in certain neighborhoods.

Mark Duggan in his paper The Effect of Gun Shows on Gun-Related Deaths: Evidence from California and Texas finds that there is:

…no evidence that gun shows lead to substantial increases in either gun homicides or suicides. In addition, tighter regulation of gun shows does not appear to reduce the number of firearms-related deaths.

Shawn Cole and Gauri Kartini Shastry determine the following in their paper If You Are So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? The Effects of Education, Financial Literacy and Cognitive Ability on Financial Market Participation:

Individuals with one more year of schooling are 7.6% more likely to report positive investment income. Similarly, those graduating from high school are signi…cantly more likely to report income from retirement savings than those not graduating. … because education affects fi…nancial market participation, studies that focus on wage earnings may in fact underestimate the returns to investment in human capital; this suggests adjusting earlier cost-bene…t analyses of educational programs.

Dan Black, Natalia Kolesnikova, and Lowell J. Taylor have some interesting data points on womens’ participication in the labour force found in their paper Why Do So Few Women Work in New York (and So Many in Minneapolis)? Labor Supply of Married Women Across US Cities.  They suggest:

We find a negative association between commuting time and women’s labor force participation rates… …metropolitan areas which experienced relatively large increases in average commuting times between 1980 and 2000 experienced slower growth of labor force participation of married women.  … we see that a 10 minute increase in an MSA’s commute time is associated with about a 3 percentage point decline in participation.   …we must in the end be cautious about make statements concerning causality…  …households in which the woman chooses not to work are less likely to locate into (presumably expensive) locations that have good work opportunities and short commuting times.

In their, now reasonably famous, paper The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution, Greg Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl challenge readers on their ideas of societal utility optimization through the use of height as a clear proxy for acheivement.  They state:

A tax on height follows inexorably from a well-established empirical regularity and the standard approach to the optimal design of tax policy. If the conclusion is rejected, the assumptions must be reconsidered. Our results, therefore, leave readers with a menu of conclusions. You must either advocate a tax on height, or you must reject, or at least signi…cantly amend, the conventional Utilitarian approach to optimal taxation. The choice is yours, but the choice cannot be avoided.

Congrats!

While I would rank myself as a skeptic of global warming, especially of the histrionic man-bear-pig Al Gore variety, articles like this entertain me for reasons other than the debunking.

Global Warming, or Climate Change as many would have us call it, attracts grand standers like any other fad.  Tim Flannery, as mentioned in the above article, is a look-at-me-look-at-me kind of proselytizer.  The more outlandish, and entirely verfiable, his predictions are, the more press he seems to have received.  He joins such prediction luminaries as the inestimably stupid Paul Ehrlich.

The reasons that global warming activists generally get on my nerves and do not move me to action tend to fall in these areas:

• The activists themselves are often scientifically illiterate.  It’s tough to take the clueless seriously.
• Hyperbole is very regularly used and justified because it furthers a righteous agenda.
• Morality is mostly the fall back position when the point being made is shown to be contradictory with the larger thesis of global warming, with the resounding idea, “it’s better to do something than nothing.”

If the global warming experts, i.e. the scientists that have this stuff down cold, and are willing to back their theories up publically, would vociferously distance themselves from the grandstanders and morons I would be more inclined to trust their motivations and their predictions.   To date, I haven’t seen many that would do so.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

They compare three regulatory regime styles that in turn allow for:

1. single technology where resellers sell the same thing
2. single technology where resellers also can invest in their own infrastructure
3. multi technologies

They found that those jurisdictions that allowed for multiple types of broadband infrastructure happened to have higher broadband penetration rates.

In the third option where more competition exists, there was better market access and therefore more purchases.

Differences in regulatory policies have also played a crucial role. Countries that promoted competition between different platforms (e.g. by investing in cable infrastructure) have done significantly better. In contrast, countries that mainly promoted service-based intra-platform competition on the incumbent’s network have on average done worse. This is consistent with the view that service-based competition does not provide sufficient investment incentives to new entrants and discourages investment of the incumbent operator.

This isn’t surprising - more competition provides for more options for consumers, better prices and if the product has any efficacy at all, higher penetration.  Their phrasing that “regulations matter” is slightly obtuse when they don’t correlate that number three explicitly has looser regulations than the other.  It’s not that the regulations pursue a particular technology it’s that they provide for increasing levels of competition. What is surprising is that the authors weren’t merely looking for a proof that more open markets provide better outcomes.

Their conclusions instead of promoting their third option should have been to promote the unstated fourth option: allow industry to provide broadband access by whatever technologies are available (except where those technologies which create negative externalities).  New options will be explored and provided, the garbage will drop out of the market and society will be better off.

To put things very simply, it wasn’t a lack of regulations that let Madoff run his scheme for as long as he did.

What allowed him to evade prosecution by current laws was merely a lack of due dilligence on the part of the investors in his “fund”.  While most investments take a bit of faith in honesty by the investor, the existence of regulations is not enough to keep from getting screwed.  Investors have the responsibility to investigate the worthiness of anything they put money into.  The excuses, that the fund was a private one and didn’t have the same regulations for disclosure as public investments, are lame - if a business isn’t willing to open the books to a full and complete independent audit when a billion dollars are at stake then the investment isn’t worthy.  If the investors were not bold or competent enough to ask for a full audit before investing, then the investor is at fault as well.

Madoff’s fund was created by a con man and was supported over many years by willfully ignorant investors which poor or completely unexercised financial acumen.

As the folks at the eSkeptic blog write:

There are few areas of functioning where skepticism is more important than how one invests one’s life savings.

It’s pretty clear where the blame lies - with Madoff and all of his investors.

Luminaries of the political right, like Sarkozy and Brown are trumpeting nationalism over markets.  The Left is doing exactly what you would expect - Marxists and soft-left types are singing in solidarity.  Even Paul Krugman has joined the corus suggesting that the GOP is small government.

Ron Paul has an excellent response to this whole thing in his aptly titled column, Has Capitalism Failed? It’s quite clear that the problems that have occurred over the past 3 (or 15) years have not been due to underregulation of markets.  The best quote of the entire stack is:

Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven’t had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It’s not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate taxes, privileged government contracts to the military-industrial complex, and a foreign policy controlled by corporate interests and overseas investments. Add to this centralized federal mismanagement of farming, education, medicine, insurance, banking and welfare. This is not capitalism!

Michael Shermer also steps in with a recent blog post describing the bloat of regulations that has occurred since the 70s.  In the US, the amount of regulation and the amount of money spent on it means that it’s very likely that few people or institutions know how to navigate the regulation - certainly leading to perverse incentives, like those that lead to the property market crash in the US.

In no way has Bush or any of the recent US Presidents been anything resembling capitalist or free-market - the tax dollars thrown around and the surfeit of regulations is testament to the lack of freedom in the market.

Over the holidays betwixt events and Events and the like I worked my way throughsafer loads of TV and movies and had the chance to read through, Harford’s Logic of Life, Landesburg’s More Sex is Safer Sex, Truss’s Talk to the Hand, Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination, and a reread of Coase’s The Nature of the Firm, among other less intellectually stimulating fare.

Hardford’s book is a very enjoyable read, de- and constructing a variety of arguments for the sometimes hidden economic logic behind human actions and interaction.  Well worth the read.  Landesburg’s More Sex is just as enjoyable but with logic arguments that are meandering and long - merely trying to guess his end point is enjoyable enough.  Truss’s rant is reasonably good but would mostly appeal to people that firmly believe that the world is a worse place than it was 30, 50, 100 years ago - in many ways it is but mostly it’s not.  Becker’s book on discrimination was excellent and warrants a couple page discussion just on it’s own - was interesting to read after the US election.

And, Coase’s paper is worth reading, especially when thinking about the explosion of market and transaction information, leading to reduced collective bargaining, more independent consulting, and pseudo and amorphous professional collectives.  I really think that this one should be dusted off and republished by those hip business magazines that usually subsist on truly ephemeral fads.

Anyway, I’ve got about 80 saved topics to work through over the next little bit and some of it’s going to get stale like organic bread.

The US should start to discuss the issue that it at the source of this stance: the federation of states that is the US is incapable of working internationally when matters of State jurisdiction override the mandate of the federal.  It the follows that the 50 States should send their own delegations to the UN instead of relying on the federal government to meet their needs in international agreements.

Of course, expecting anything meaningful from the UN at all is hollow.  This is an organization with a Security Council of warmongers, where despotic states chair human rights councils, countries with no human rights still have the ability to negotiate a variety of international law deals, and member countries like France, the highest per-capita exporter of arms to the world, pretends to care about human welfare by sponsoring gay rights declarations.

Of course, back to the original point, if the US government actually bought into the Constitution, it’d have no problem supporting the passage of a declaration attacking the criminalization of homosexuality.  You’d think that we were still stuck in the 19th century.

Thanks to MSNBC for the tip.

1. The Hampshire County Council decided that the tinsel adorning the stop sign of a lollipop man should be removed in case it distracts drivers.  No drivers had been reported as distracted.  A local councillor suggested he would look into the matter.
2. Port Talbot police decided that a local shopkeeper was publishing offensive jokes in his shop flyers.  He was warned that he could be prosecuted under a public order offence.  The local police spokesman clarified that they made the right choice and that the correct action was taken to save the sensibilities of the locals.
3. A woman in South Shields was warned by a local bureaucrat that her Christmas lights were likely offensive to her non-Christian neighbours.  No neighbour had complained and it seemed the council employee decided to take it upon himself to warn her in their stead.  Nicely the local council suggested that the worker was a twit.
4. Tool storage shed break-ins at a leased garden in Bristol City have prompted the local council to tell locals not to lock their sheds since the maintenance of fixing damaged sheds is too expensive.  A spokesman suggested that for those with expensive equipment a conversation with their insurance provider would help them determine if securing their valuables was a good idea.  No mention was made of an idea to improve the security of the sheds.

Thanks to Reason for some of the links.

• Recently TD Bank suggests that oil prices will be 30USD in the 2nd quarter of 2009.
• In their prior forecast they suggested that the price would be closer to 45USD.
• In a report on agriculture from November 2008 they suggest that oil will average 65-75USD during 2009.
• In a report from April 2008 they had an outlook for prices still in the 80-90USD range for Q1 2009.

What does this mean?  That TD doesn’t seem to have much luck in forecasting the price of oil and, mostly, that forecasts are bullshit.

Does this mean that forecasts shouldn’t be done?  No, just that betting the house on the surmisings of a bank economics group isn’t a good idea.  Forecasts are decent at illustrating trends but are generally very poor at accuracy. They’re mostly good at determining, after the fact, where your analysis was wrong so you hopefully don’t make the same mistakes twice.  Of course, given the turnover in a bank’s economics group, there’s likely to be a loss of experience over time making the same mistakes reasonably likely.

Of course someone, somewhere will get a forecast right and they’ll be the prediction guru for the next while.

In the latest Cryptogram, Bruce Schneier puts together 3 short articles on things we should keep in mind after the terror attacks in Mumbai.  My favorites are:

Low-tech is very effective. Movie-plot threats — terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists with biological agents, terrorists targeting our water supplies — might be what people worry about, but a bunch of trained (we don’t really know yet what sort of training they had, but it’s clear that they had some) men with guns and grenades is all they needed.

The Mumbai terrorists used Google Earth to help plan their attacks. This is bothering some people… Of course the terrorists used Google Earth. They also used boats, and ate at restaurants. Don’t even get me started about the fact that they breathed air and drank water.

Read the whole newsletter here, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to get it monthly.

The economic crisis has to be stabilized immediately. This has to be carried out pragmatically, without undue ideology, and without reliance on the failed ideas and assumptions which led to the crisis. Complexity science can help here. For example, it is wrong to speak of “restoring the markets to equilibrium”, because the markets have never been in equilibrium. We are already way ahead if we speak of “restoring the markets to a stable, self-organized critical state.”

I like the idea of helping restore the “market” to a self-organized critical state, but I’m not sure that the authors of the idea understand what the “market” is.

Interestingly, in the same issue, a selected panel of Edge regulars have responded to the idea.  Given that the idea of group of scientists fixing the world is pretty clear in its intent, it means that taking a position on the efficacy of the idea would also be clear.

Michael Shermer echoes my position on the idea most closely when he suggests,

The economy is a product of human action, not of human design. Trying to redesign something that was never designed in the first place is futile.

He suggests this thought experiment:

…imagine the futility of government bureaucrats trying to find the right price for each of the approximately 170,000 different books published each year, factoring in hardback versus paperback prices, special discounts for multiple purchases of bundled books, plus shipping specials for minimum sales and factoring in, of course, the discriminatory pricing now used in the same way the airlines price their tickets, and then imagine multiplying that process by the hundreds of thousands of different markets, industries, and businesses and it becomes crashingly clear why no top-down system could ever match the real-time sensitivity to prices provided by the bottom-up complex adaptive pricing system currently in place.

People have been making and trading for millennia, and doing it fairly efficiently in the absence of punitive governmental controls.  Every experiment of a designed economy in recent human history has created misery on a scale unmatched by the self-organization of a free market.  (Dr. Shermer has a good post discussing the idea that the mere existence of almost 80,000 pages of financial regulations will create unforseen incentives that will often cause breakdowns in a market economy.)

Douglas Rushkoff mistakenly suggests that a market economy is “synthetic and manufactured” and misses the point that open markets are a self-organized system, not one that can easily be bettered through some kind of design.  He seems to think that economics is all models, rather than more clearly identifying that a self-organizing economy might be able to be partially modelled, but certainly isn’t based on a model of any kind.

Nassim Taleb makes a good point that what he calls scientism, the attempted design of the economy (and as I see it, the creation of perverse incentives), is primarly to blame for the current economic crisis, not open-market failures.

George Dyson suggests, quite succinctly:

Instead of attempting to prop up failed institutions with money that does not exist, we should be launching new institutions with money that does.

Emanuel Derman is more poetic when he writes:

Whenever we make a model of something involving human beings, we are trying to force the ugly stepsister’s foot into Cinderella’s pretty glass slipper. It doesn’t fit without cutting off some of the essential parts.

Currently slinging trillions of dollars randomly at a problem, with no current discernable affect is like giving a cold sufferer a random drug and suggesting that in 6-10 days they’ll feel better.  The ones doing the throwing of taxpayers money have no idea, and two years from now will have no idea what amount of the money spent had a positive effect on the economy.

Any politician or public servant that suggests that they have a solid idea of a “cure” for the current crisis is willfully ignorant or is lying to funnel money to their pet projects.  What the world economy needs, in this transformation from an industrial economy to an information one, is a bit of creative destruction.  Let the economy shed old gangrenous parts and allow for creation of new, dynamic engines of growth.

Libertarianism is generally defined as individualism, with clear property rights and minimal (but not zero) government - and is clearly an antonym of authoritarianism.  A pretty simple definition.  Getting into the line between left and right libertarianism gets a little pendantic.  The mentioned article has sterling quotes like:

The reoccuring theme of the right-libertarians appears to reduce to a total indifferance to or denial of the degree to which the status quo of the economy is warped and exploitative in its nature.

And

What is most strange about the matter, however, is that the left-libertarians are generally actually being consistant with Murray Rothbard, while the right-libertarians are not (or by the very least, they clearly selectively draw from Rothbard’s later, more conservative years).

While I believe that the article is intended for a very specific (and navel gazing) audience, its mere existence provides fodder to show that libertarians can’t get their act together and provide a coherent and, most importantly, simple philosophy.  Unless libertarians can avoid public schism, the movement (if there is A movement) with be marginalized.

I do like the fact the Libertarian Party of Canada has a pretty clear philosophy and seems to have been relatively free of schisms.  I’m thinking I should join, but sometimes I think that in a few years it’ll be the equivalent of being a commie with McCarthy running around…

Since the city instituted all of these changes, making a fairly simple process excessively complex, there seems to be a lot of cheating going on.  This is partially because many people have not yet received their city-mandated bins nor their extra-special garbage tags.  In spite of the delays a garbage police squad of 44 are already on duty - with another 15 coming - ready to make examples of garbage flagrancy. And through all this many residents have not had their garbage picked up for weeks because they’re not in compliance since they have not been given the equipment required.

There are couple of interesting economic lessons to be culled from this situation:

1. When a public good, like trash pickup, is suddenly changed to user-pay you will likely get cheating unless you can solve the free-rider problem (getting the benefit without paying).  The city is attempting to do this through a combination of negative incentives, including, not getting your trash picked up if the trash isn’t suitable.  The problem is the process creates a negative externality in a surfeit of uncollected trash that will affect the quality of life of those living near the uncollected trash.  In turn the city has hired a team of 59 garbage police to fine those who are relatively indifferent to trash piles - those without much of a reciprocity motive.
2. The city of Toronto has gone forward with this change assuming (or at least that’s how it seems) that the demand for garbage pick-up is highly inelastic.  Meaning that they thought that a perceived price increase from zero (adequately hidden in property taxes) to something other than zero would not significantly alter behaviour.  What they haven’t adequately examined is what the substitutes for trash pickup are: trash hoarding, transfers between collaborating neighbours, illegal dumping (in ditches to Home Depot bins) and of course illegal burning.  Even the Toronto manager for waste enforcement alludes to the idea that increased trash in public areas is due to onerous regulations, yet he seems dumbfounded that it’s happening.
3. Since city administration do not have clear incentives to serve the citizens of their burg, such things as inefficient delivery of services related to newly passed edicts are not high on the list.  This will clearly exacerbate cheating.

As Tyler Cowen writes in the Public Goods article at the CEE:

Private means of avoiding or transforming public-goods problems, when available, are usually more efficient than governmental solutions.

This leads to the primary point of this article.  The best method of solving this problem, through reduced costs and more efficient service, would be to privatize trash collection - have home owners contract removal with the company of their choice. This will present people with a truer price for the amount of trash that the generate since the company that removes it will have to charge enough to cover costs of landfill creation, transportation and potential future liabilities.

There will still be problems with this solution as there are those that will not pay for trash removal, again creating negative consequences for their neighbours.  These people can easily be dealt with under existing littering and nuisance laws, without the need for specialized trash inspectors.

The clearest point made in the segment is that people seem to very comfortable wearing clothing of mass murderers as long as they’re the communist brand of socialism as opposed to the fascist version.

Guevera was a militaristic and violent man that advocated the overthrow of government and was very comfortable killing anyone that opposed him.  He personally had thousands people killed during his time running La Cabana and had no compunction killing others in his staged rebellions in other countries.

Anyone who wears a Che (or Mao or Stalin) t-shirt or emblem is either guilty of willful ignorance or is actually suggesting that mass murder is a perfectly acceptable method of political control.  Why these monsters deserve adulation when Hitler and Pol Pot are rightly and almost universely derided is truly bizarre.

The state Health Minister has suggested the changes are being done to help combat juvenile suicide problems in the state.  The response of the government and regional teachers union has been one to deride suggestions that red pen isn’t likely a problem.  Opposition member McArdle is quoted as saying:

Given your 10-year-old Labor government presides over the lowest numeracy and literacy standards of any state in Australia, don’t you think it’s time we focused on classroom outcomes rather than these kooky, loony, loopy, lefty policies?

(I found very interesting that most media outlets didn’t quote the above statement entirely, preferring to remove any mention of the low standards, instead only showing the alliteration portion.)

I would love to read a study that shows a causal link between red pen use and increased suicide.  I’d also like to see the paper and the rest of the suggestions - after perusing over 50 articles on the matter I couldn’t find a link to the actual report.

David Swann is by all accounts a nice, approachable and passionate guy with a reasonable amount of political experience.  He isn’t, however, someone who will resonate with Alberta voters.  The core of the party clearly needs purging as the old guard, who are clearly incapable of mounting a serious alternative to the Conservative machine, continue to endorse and select lame ducks.  You would have thought after the disastrous federal Liberal choice of a left-pandering egghead that the ALP would have decided put in someone who stood a chance of changing politics in Alberta.  It would seem that the core of the party doesn’t spend enough time talking to the majority of Albertans, preferring mental inbreeding to exploration.

I wish the ALP luck in the future and hope that the next time around the leadership choice stands a chance of actually furthering the election prospects of the party.  I wish Dave Taylor much luck in the next provincial election, along with his other opponent Mo Elsahy.  There will be another chance to make real change in the party and the province.

Apple has been doing much better with the iPhone since it’s application store model makes it very easy to grab cool tools and toys to add in.  For the first time in 5 years I’m quite interested in picking one of these things up - the iPhone being easily the safest bet.  I know that Apple certainly doesn’t need my endorsement.

Anyway, back to the application demo that was forwarded to me.  The crew at Calgary Scientific (based in Calgary) is doing some pretty cool stuff with medical imaging and display using COTS (commercial off the shelf) components.  This latest toy they’ve trotted out is amply demoed in a YouTube video.  As a doctor, or technician you can get MRI data, via slices and 3D models dumped directly to your iPhone for interaction.

Take a look at the coolest app I’ve yet seen for a COTS handheld - we’re (as a society) finally starting to make measurable and practical use of all these toys that have been mostly reserved for porn, music, (mostly useless) chat and mentally stulifying video games.

Thanks to James Henry (of Calgary Scientific) for the forward.

How often do firms headquartered in (country name) engage in bribery in this country?

Basic stats:

• Canada and Belgium are the cleanest of 22 countries
• Russians are at the bottom of the list just below China, Mexico and India

Some interesting things about Canada’s stats:

• While this report makes us look principled, maybe we’re just cheap.
• While still unlikely, we seem to be more likely to bribe lower level officials than higher, counter to the compulsive bribers from Russia.  Since low level bribery is likely to cost less, this suggests, again, that we’re maybe cheap.
• Canada ranks 6th when it comes to using personal relationships, i.e. non-monetary influence, to get things moving overseas.  Again, this might be because we’re cheap.

I prefer to believe that we’re principled and cheap.

Thanks to the Economist for the link.

Serious resources were being marshalled against the mat scourge as the intent of the council was clear.  As the Telegraph noted:

Other council tenants in the borough could be sent letters in the coming months if their mats are deemed to be dangerous. But the council has not enforced a blanket ban, saying it would assess each mat on an individual basis.

They’ll have to hire a new crack squad of mat cops just to keep up with the complaints. They’ll have to write a mat guide so that new recruits have clear rules around acceptable mats and mat placement.

I sure hope my local council is that good at protecting me and spending my money so wisely.

Anyone could opt out of employment at any time. Those with few skills would no longer be forced to take up jobs with poor prospects, and employers offering McJobs would be compelled to offer better terms.

So, what Mr. Raventos is suggesting is that removing the incentive to work for low skilled individuals is a good thing.  This in turn would remove the need for post and, probably, mere secondary education as those with poor prospects can be helped to their subsistence lifestyle early on in life.  McJobs would disappear for lack of want, and those tasks would likely be taken up by the hordes of human-serving robots that will miraculously appear after public-policy implementation.  And since those McJobs are mostly done by teenagers and those looking for part-time work, they’ll have more time to play their XBoxes and text their friends.

Sounds like utopia.

I’m not sure if Mr. Raventos has compared his “revolutionary” idea to a similar idea that was experimentally implemented in Sweden in the 70s and 80s.  It collapsed after a generation of Swedes decided they didn’t want to foster laziness and entitlement.

It’s truly poor economics, since it disregards understanding of basic human behaviour.

NOTE: The sub-title to the book is “The Material Conditions of Freedom.”

I’ve been lucky enough to be on the mailing lists of the three leadership hopefuls, and policy statements and positions have been showing up regularly.  None of the information I’ve received has changed my mind on my decision.

Dave Taylor is running a solid campaign, being kind to his opponents, while making it clear that real change is required to mount any kind of move against the current government.

Mo Elsalhy has been saying the same things, slightly stronger and is trumpeting his younger age as an advantage.

David Swan is continuing to trot out more of the same blather that has marked the ALP for failure.

If David Swan gets in, the ALP membership will only have itself to blame for another 10 years of Tory power in Alberta.

…it should be possible to guess an individuals’ cultural origin by observing her way of counting up to ten on the fingers

They then conclude that:

… only the finger gestures of Germans and English-Canadians can be characterized by a high degree of uniformity, whereas all other groups showed high degrees of individual variety.

It was also mentioned that in English speaking Canada that immigrants tend to pick up the local gestures relatively quickly.

I’m still wondering why this hasn’t been picked up more widely.  Seriously, this kind of stuff is not only interesting but highly entertaining.  Of course, there are studies about beer where the synopsis takes all the fun out of it.

Among infants wearing disposable diapers, there is an increased risk of [Urinary Tract Infection] as the frequency of changing diapers decreases.

Boy am I glad I read the study, I was getting this diaper changing thing all wrong…

• Both McKenna and Manley actively distanced themselves from the coalition, lead by everyone’s least favourite Liberal.
• Marois and then Parizeau (always good for a laugh), piped up with solid support for the goodies and cash that would follow with the coalition and added to the growing dislike of the idea.
• May steps in and throws her considerable influence behind the coalition, mistaking her trouncing at the polls as some sort of credibility, and she opines aloud that she’s Senate material.  People shake their heads.
• A Liberal MP speaks out against Dion and the current coalition, making Dion look less.
• A polls suggests that people like the coalition not very much.
• Dion blinks in the midst of the staredown and suggests that his well thought out and rock hard plan might, maybe also include a coalition with the Tories.
• Ignatieff and Rae continue to pretend that they support Dion.
• Dion unleashes The video that seems to lend an air of illegitimacy to his revenge fueled power grab.
• Harper consults with our entirely unelected (and hot) head-of-state and dodges a bullet until at least mid-January.
• More Liberals are very subtle, almost unpleasant, about their love for Dion.
• Ignatieff and Rae start to no longer pretend that they respect Dion while still pretending to like the coalition idea.
• Ignatieff and Rae suggest a quick rather than long and painful overthrough of everyone’s favourite Liberal.
• Dion finally quits and ends months of elector pain, stopping the joke fodder machine, while Ignatieff surmises that the coalition sucks.
• Coalition partners remind Ignatieff (or the unmentioned Rae) of his duty to their fine plan.
• Rae decides that he’s not ready to be all powerful leader of the natural governing party of Canada.
• Ignatieff gets in there, but not everyone is happy about it.
• And throughout, the Tories continue a campaign to discredit the coalition and the Liberals in general.

So here we stand.  This has truly been the most interesting 2 weeks of Canadian politics in the past 15 years.  I hope there’s more to come.

I did a little digging and found that the possible fines available as “incentive” for Calgary bylaw officers would make such a move here prohibitive.  Fines are around $100 per patron, with the bar being subject to 10 or more times that.  Only a very infrequent imposition of the law would make sense here.

I’ve always made it clear where my feelings on smoking in bars stands.  Private property should not be under the control of the state unless it adversely affects other private property (including people).  Hence a bar should be free to allow smoking on premises, as long as it doesn’t force people to smoke.

Of course Canada doesn’t have property rights like other countries.

This is true of most aspects of enforced public funding, including education and healthcare.  Those politicians that can afford alternatives often take advantage of them by stepping outside the system when desired.  The only choice given to those that cannot afford alternatives is no alternative at all.

Counterterrorism unit,

Officers didn’t just search the home of [MP] Damian Green – they arrested him, raided his office, and detained him for nine hours as part of an investigation into the leaking of government documents.

It seems that the MP is known for obtaining leaked documents and using them to make points against the governing Labour party.  That said, the strike team didn’t have a warrant…

In the same article, a quote by Mark Garnett of Lancaster University suggests:

“Politics used to be concerned with vision and ideology, but increasingly we live in a world where political options are closed down by globalization. Instead, the government now sees its main purpose as ensuring security.”

Of course the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, thinks that counterterrorism money is used on non-terrorism related issues is just fine.  It’s good to know that counterterrorism is just for terrorism anymore.

In an unrelated, related story, the Independent reports that new powers are being pushed through parliament that would give MPs the power to merge any set of government databases in attempts to serve up information on malcontents and nefarious characters.  The opposition pointed out that the current government has enough trouble not losing data from one database, suggesting the damage from an omnibus data warehouse could be disastrous.  Even the Europeans think that the UK has gone too far.

Best quote from that article:

The Ministry of Justice said data-sharing was essential for the delivery of “efficient and effective public services, tackling crime and protecting the public”. “Any draft order would require parliamentary approval and a privacy impact assessment,” said a spokesman. “Additionally, the Information Commissioner would have been invited to comment on the proposals. This will ensure any potential privacy issues and risks are identified and examined.

Wow!  Such protection!  The Information Commissioner can comment on egregious use of government power.

Here’s hoping this surveillance and information fetish doesn’t cross over to this part of the Commonwealth.

Their study tracked the earnings of a mix of people comparing those who grew up in communities with fluoridated drinking water and those without.  They came to a variety of conclusions based on their analysis:

• women growing up with fluoridated water earn 4% more than those who did not;
• losing one tooth alters earnings of an affected woman by $720/year, and;
• women of low “social economic status” see the biggest benefits of fluoridation.

The point of the paper was to determine if women and men are held to different standards of physical appearance.

The executive summary from the NBER (issued in March, but just emailed last week) doesn’t explicitly say that income of localities was controlled for in the study, though this ambiguous statement was included:

[Fluoridation] spread slowly throughout the United States, without any apparent relationship to wages or family income at the time it was introduced.

Lulu Matheson had been growing tomatoes on her windowsills and these seemingly set the alarm bells ringing for the local police.  Obviously the Northern Constabulary’s training criteria doesn’t include teaching their recruits how to visually identify the devil’s other weed - especially as the plants actually had tomatoes hanging from them.

The answer to this whole problem, the ongoing employment of UK petty crime detection units aside, is fairly obvious.  Legalize it.  Pretty easy.  The constables like the ones in this story can get back to frying fish and chips.

As of December 4th, the cops still had not apologized to Mrs. Matheson or her son, Gus.

Thanks to the Telegraph for the info.

I’ll endeavour to get my readership above zero over the next few days.