I am never ever going to vote for John Tory, nor as far as I can tell are any of my conservative neighbors, friends or
family. While John Tory is leader we are not going to donate money to your party. If John Tory leads the party during the next
election, we are not going to allow you to put Progressive Conservative signs on our front lawns.
Wow, I'll let others worry more about the "one
laptop per terrorist supporter" issues and say, WTF? They city's spending almost $11,000,000 / year to give computers and
high-speed Internet to 3000 families? That's about $3500 / family! Who are they buying these things from, Dash Domi? Why not just give half to the schools and half
to the local libraries to put computers for everyone?
Now, this sounds more like a "social justice" program -- i.e. Bucks for Buzz and his Boys -- than it does a meaningful
attempt to help anyone, but I've got a better deal for the city and the disadvantaged: outsource it to me and I'll save the
city lots of money and double the number of disadvantaged kids getting computers.
For $450 I can get Dell Inspiron 531 with
plenty of everything and a 17" LCD Monitor
The logistics are fairly simple. Dell will ship directly to their apartment and I'll handle the Rogers billing from here.
I'll assume I can get Rogers and Dell to eat GST & PST given the size of the order we're making, plus the potential for a
tax write off for everyone. Rogers and Dell will also handle tech support directly, which is a reasonable part of becoming
computer literate. The city will provide the names and addresses who to ship to. I'll need 5 people at say $50,000 / each to
handle paperwork and logistics. One person will be dedicated to Googling names to weed out friends-of-terrorists. Let's also
posit that I'll maintain another 6000 Internet accounts for people who have already got their computers.
So here's the budget:
Internet connection: $1.65 million (6000 @ 22.95/month * 12 months)
Legacy internet: $1.65 million (6000 @ 22.95/month * 12 months)
Computers: $2.7 million (6000 @ $450 / each)
Employees: $250,000 (5 @ $50,000)
Offices: $150,000
Subtotal: $6.4 million
Management fee: 1.28 million (20%)
Grand total: $7.68 million
Savings to City of Toronto: $3.08 million
That'll buy Dave Miller a lot of food
carts. I'm available on my cell during normal working hours.
David Miller's right hand transit boy Adam Giambrone is threatening to smash up his trains and go home because the ungrateful
slobs in Toronto don't know what's good for them, quit their whinging and take their tax medicine. The source of all this angst
and teeth gnashing is something to do with a 350 million some-odd dollar "shortfall" in the latest and greatest 7.8 billion
budget, which the clever kids at city hall were going make up a series of taxes and fees aimed at maximizing the pain on
non-Mayor Quimby voters.
Why does Toronto need a 7.8 billion dollar budget, given that city basically stopped growing in the last decade? God only
knows -- here's a little Excel chart I whipped up showing the Toronto operating budgets, constant dollar adjustments (assuming
2% inflation) and a per-pop breakdown where I could do it:
Year
Operating
Constant
Population
per Pop
1998
5.6
6.69
1999
5.5
6.44
2000
5.9
6.78
2001
6.1
6.87
2,481,494
$2,768
2002
6.2
6.85
2003
6.4
6.93
2004
6.6
7.00
2005
7.1
7.39
2006
7.1
7.24
2007
7.8
7.80
2,503,281
$3,116
Since amalgamation, our budget has gone up a billion and change with no substantial population growth.
BTW, Mike Harris has been gone from power since 2002, so you can stop blaming him for downloading. It's been implicitly
endorsed by his successors, neither named Mike or Harris.
Karan Arora is offering immigration
advice, and the young Punjabi woman across his desk seems nervous. Her visitor's visa is about to run out, and she wants to
stay. Arora, who works for a Mississauga company run by a registered immigration consultant, has a solution.
"Why are you worried?" he asks in Hindi. "Monaji, you don't have any other option. If you claim refugee status, then at
least you can breathe a sigh of relief. Then your other option is to go back. Once you claim refugee status, then if you find
a guy, you can marry him and apply for a spousal case."
"What will my refugee story be?" she asks.
"We'll do that," he says. "We'll do it all. Some truth, some lies, we'll mix everything. It will have to be done."
Here's a few minor suggestions:
claimants for refugee status in Canada should have to make the claim within 48 hours of arriving in Canada (barring things such
as major political changes within their home countries). This should be printed clearly on immigration documents, etc.. Failed
refugee claimants should always be deported directly from the place they had their last hearing.
People arriving in Canada via another Western country and making refugee claims should be deported to that country to make
their claim there: they're supposed to be claiming refuge, not venue shopping.
The government estimates that replacing the 87 million incandescent bulbs in use across Ontario with more efficient bulbs
would save six million megawatt hours every year — enough to power 600,000 homes.
Changing to more efficient bulbs is also the equivalent — in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions — of taking 250,000
cars off the road, said Ontario Environment Minister Laurel Broten, who announced the move along with Energy Minister Dwight
Duncan on Wednesday morning.
We'll see -- they'll have to provide a lot more light than the 40 watt ones I'm using around the house, or people will just
start doubling and tripling them up.
Update: given the timeframe for implementation, that many people have started making
the transition and that the price should fall significantly over the next 5 years, this looks like a very clever way of taking
credit for something that was already happening.
TransitCamp on Sunday was very interesting. Here's a video from CityTV that gives a pretty good overview of what was going on (that's me standing up, red scarf, trench coated at :17 in):
I attended two sessions and did the usual networking thing. The first session was about data as in opening up the transit schedules and providing real time locations of all buses and subways along the routes. You can read the session notes here. My impression? There's lots of good ideas. Kieran (who's net identity I haven't figured out yet) is working on a open collaborative data system for mapping the TTC and its routes. I'd prefer that the TTC and the city open up all its data information but I realize that this is going to require change mandated from the top down. This is something I've been b*tching about for years, and not only as an abstract sort of thing, but because I've been personally burned by it and that I think it makes Canada less competitive than the US. The TTC people in attendance didn't really say a lot. I wonder if they were scared by the presence of TTC Chair Adam Giambrone? In either case, they all gave the impression (to me, anyway) that that the TTC is very bureaucratic and not too fond of change.
In the afternoon I attended TTC + other modes of transit which covered many of the same issues. With an open way of sharing data, the TTC data could easily be integrated with Go, AutoShare*, ZipCar*, Greyhound and so on and so on. To address a particular concern about "not everyone has a computer" -- think 10 years out: with ubiquitous wifi and displays as cheap as singing birthday cards, we'll be living in a different future sooner than you think.
I'll be attending TransitCamp this morning to discuss APIs, Mashups and Microformats and to provide at least a little "from the right" perspective to what's going on:
An ad-hoc gathering at the Gladstone Hotel of designers, transit geeks, bloggers, visual artists, tech geeks and cultural creators passionate about transit in Toronto and the TTC. It is a platform for Toronto's talented design community and enthusiastic transit users and fans to demonstrate their creativity and contribute to a better way for Toronto's transit system. The content and ideas generated in this open unconference will be delivered to the TTC for their consideration in their work.
Nocera calculates that if 9 billion people in 2050 used energy at the rate that Americans do today that the world would have to generate 102.2 TW of power—more than seven times current production. If people adopted the energy lifestyle of Western Europe, power production would need to rise to 45.5 terawatts. On the other hand if the world's 9 billion in 2050 adopted India's current living standards, the world would need to produce only 4 TW of power. Nocera suggests, assuming heroic conservation measures that would enable affluent American lifestyles, that "conservative estimates of energy use place our global energy need at 28-35 TW in 2050."This means that the world will need an additional 15-22 TW of energy over the current base of 13.5 TW.
So where will the extra energy come from? Relying on figures from the World Energy Assessment by the United Nations Development Program, Nocera looks at the maximum amounts of power that various non-fossil fuel sources might supply. Biomass could supply 7-10 TW of energy, but that is the equivalent of harvesting all current crops solely for energy. Nuclear could produce 8 TW which implies building 8000 new reactors over the 45 years at a rate of one new plant every two days. Wind would generate 2.1 TW if every site on the globe with class 3 winds or greater were occupied with windmills. Winds at a class 3 site blow at 11.5 miles per hour at 33 feet above the ground. And hydro-power could produce 0.7-2 TW if dams were placed on every untapped river on the earth. Nocera concludes, "The message is clear. The additional energy we need in 2050 over the current 13.5 TW base, is simply not attainable from long discussed sources—the global appetite for energy is simply too great."
Alice Miules in The Times is saying that the UK Olympics have all gone to hell (and that the UK should pull out):
Yesterday Ms Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and political leader of the Games, admitted that costs for the Olympic park had risen 40 per cent in a year. It will now cost not the £2.375 billion of public money she promised last year that she was applying “absolute rigour” to, but £3.3 billion of public money. Then there is another £1.044 billion for regenerating the East End. London Assembly members, who meet today to discuss the Olympics budget, think it may cost £8 billion or more in the end.
Take a figure . . . double it . . . add whatever you like. Which part of the extra costs were not predictable when the bid was submitted in October 2004? A spiralling security budget, more than quadrupled now to £850 million? Did the bid team really need to wait for 7/7 to realise that an Olympics in London in 2012 would be under particular threat from Islamist terrorism? Or was it the increasing cost of land in the East End that took them by surprise, from a predicted £478 million to £1 billion and rising? I wonder who it was who failed to predict that landowners would make sure they squeezed as much as they could from a Government that had no choice but to buy their land, and fast. “We have also adjusted the transport figure to put it in 2012 figures,” Ms Jowell blithely added yesterday. Well, what figures was it in before? And who drew them up? Ah, yes. Tessa Jowell.
I was so happy when Vancouver got the Winter Olympics, knowing that this would scuttle Toronto's chances for quite some time.
For me the most amazing aspect of the repeated misrepresentation of science related to disasters and climate change is not that political advocates look to cherry pick science or go beyond the state of the science. What is most amazing is that in the face of incontrovertible and repeated misrepresentation that the overwhelming majority of scientists, the media, and responsible advocacy groups have remained mute (with a few notable exceptions such as Hans von Storch).
More than anything else, even the misrepresentations themselves, the collective willingness to overlook bad policy arguments unsupported (or even contradicted) by the current state of science while at the same time trumpeting the importance of scientific consensus is evidence of the comprehensive and pathological politicization of science in the policy debate over global warming. If climate scientists ever wonder why they are looked upon with suspicion among some people in society, they need look no further in their willingness to compromise their own intellectual standards in policy debate on the issue of disasters and climate change.
Big-budget special effects and disposable sets help make Hollywood one of California's top air polluters, pumping out 127,000 tonnes of ozone and diesel emissions a year, a study found.
[...] The institute found that the industry emits 127,000 tonnes of ozone and diesel particulate pollutant emissions from idling trucks, generators, special-effect fires and earthquakes, and the demolition of sets with dynamite and other methods.
Hollywood produced more pollution than four other industries: aerospace manufacturing, apparel, hotels and semiconductor manufacturing, the study found.
Defining the problem is for our betters to do; being forced to be part of the solution is for the little people.
The ERO projects that U.S. demand will increase by 141,000 megawatts (MW) over the next 10 years. Supply, however, will increase by only 57,000 MW, and that assumes that all currently proposed new facilities are approved and built.
[...] One key problem is the sheer difficulty in building new power plants in America today. Politically powerful green lobby groups object to the building of any new plant that does not use some form of renewable energy, yet renewable energy cannot meet demand for power on its own.
[...] This is why the ERO has recommended a series of reforms. Foremost among these is the removal of regulatory barriers to the building of new infrastructure. Power plants and transmission lines need to be built urgently; measures that facilitate green obstructionism must be repealed. Without this new capacity, the power supply system will fail.
Let us be clear about what that would mean. The electric power supply will be interrupted when it cannot meet demand. Lights will go out. Offices will cease to function. People will freeze or swelter. Elderly people will die. If sustained, this situation will severely damage the economy. Jobs will be lost. Health will suffer. The poor will get poorer. Flows of money from America to the developing world will shrink.
[...] It is a moral imperative to keep the power flowing. If our forefathers a century ago had worried about the side effects of using all that energy and set in place restrictions to stop it, millions — no, billions — would have suffered as a result.
Denied the technological advances that energy use enabled, we would live shorter lives and be doomed to labor — a poorer life in every sense. We should be thankful our ancestors chose not to legislate in our interests.
I always though there was a wonderful opportunity for the Maritime Provinces -- particularly New Brunswick -- to built power plants, oil refineries, etc. that rich Americans are afraid to build.
Mayor David Miller said early Thursday afternoon that Toronto will not be submitting a bid for the six-month world's fair.
"It slipped through the premier's fingers," said Coun. Brian Ashton. "There's no doubt in my mind that in the months to come what he will suddenly realize what he lost."
Note the weasel-like shifting of blame to someone else. Even the Greatest Mayor in the History of the Universe® (i.e. Toronto) gets in on the act:
Miller had declared the bid dead once before — last Tuesday — when he pointedly blamed both governments.
Cities are about competently delivering core services, not about mega-project ribbon cutting.
The New Scientist is running an article entitled, "Earth Without Humans." It asks what would happen to Earth if all 6.5 billion of us simply disappeared.
"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California.
Just how do things get "better" when you've subtracted the only creatures that are self-conscious enough to know better from worse?
I suppose I'll add that polution isn't really different than poop -- it's value or lack-thereof is defined by humans, in the long run the environment will take care of it, and for the (much more import) short run, we just have to make sure it doesn't pile up in public places and make an awful smell.
Gheorghe Lucian is flown around the world to confront rich, privileged environmentalists who try to keep the poor down, improvished and no doubtedly, quaint. The Telegraph reports:
An unemployed Romanian miner who is flown across the globe to confront environmental activists is the unlikely star of a Michael Moore-style film, aimed at debunking the militant green movement.
Gheorghe Lucian, 23, is a plain-speaking resident of an impoverished village where an opencast gold mine is planned.
He is dismayed that the project, which would bring a £400 million investment and generate 600 jobs in an area where unemployment is 70 per cent, is being blocked by environmentalists.
[...] The official admitted that residents of Fort Dauphin, where environmentalists are objecting to a mine, were "economically disadvantaged" and many had no jobs. But he insisted: "I could put you with a family and you count how many times in a day that family smiles, if you could measure stress. Then I put you with a family well off, or in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile and measure stress… Then you tell me who is rich and who is poor."
Using a style reminiscent of Michael Moore, whose film Fahrenheit 9/11 lampooned the Bush administration, Mr McAleer lured environmentalists into making statements that were false or patently ridiculous.
During the hour-long film, Françoise Heidebroek, a Belgian opponent of the Rosia Montana mine, says Romanian villagers prefer to use horses rather than cars, and to rely on "traditional cattle raising, small agriculture, wood processing" to live.
Locals retort that their land is too poor for farming, that they all want cars and that they are desperate for the investment the mine would bring. The film had its first screening last week at a conference of gold-mining companies in Denver, Colorado. Alan Hill, president of Gabriel Resources, which did not control the film's content, said: "Before, the environmentalists would lob mortars at us and we would keep our heads down. Now, there is a big push back."
Weirdly, I'm reminded of Drew Barrymore bragging about having had taken a dump in the woods. If you were to visit her house today, I somehow doubt you'll find a little squat out back in the dirt where she does her business.
Jamming carrot sticks and other unpalatable crap down kids mouths in England doesn't seem to be working:
"I don't buy any of the stuff in the canteen, it's disgusting,' she says. "The drinks are vile - there's no sugar in them. And as for the food, well, it's all salads and vegetables and stuff - and I don't like that.
"So I stock up before school on crisps and lollipops and chews, then at lunchtime I go and eat them where none of them nosy teachers is looking."
Joanne's friends laugh and agree. They say that since the school got 'sick-bag food', they never go to the canteen. They much prefer to munch their sticky, fatty snacks in secret where no 'health police' can find them.
It's not quite what the Government intended when it set up the healthy food initiative.
CBC is reporting this information about child abductor Peter Whitmore whom the police are currently searching for:
He has been jailed several times for crimes involving children. Whitmore served 16 months in custody after being convicted in Ontario in 1993 of abduction and sexual offences involving four boys.
Just nine days after he was released, he took an eight-year-old girl from Guelph, Ont., to Toronto. He received a 56-month sentence.
Weeks after his release in November 2000, Whitmore was found with a 13-year-old boy in a Toronto motel. His sentence for that offence was one year in jail.
In 2002, Whitmore fled to British Columbia after he was accused of more parole violations in Ontario, including befriending a five-year-old boy. When he was arrested by police in B.C., he was carrying latex gloves, duct tape and pictures of young children.
After that arrest, he was given a three-year sentence that included 12 months of psychiatric treatment at Kingston Penitentiary.
Whitmore is what he is. What Canada needs is a National Judge Registry, to figure out who the hell is letting this freak back out on the streets.
