Quotulatiousness

April 12, 2011

Bolivia to pass laws giving “nature” equal rights with humans

Filed under: Americas, Environment, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

I had to check the date on this Guardian article, just to be sure it wasn’t an April Fools’ Day posting:

Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature “to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities”.

I don’t know where the government is planning on moving all the Bolivians, because just by occupying the country, they’ll be violating these new rights on a moment-to-moment basis.

A “gun-crazed oil-drunk Albertan” on the NDP and Green platforms

Colby Cosh tries to be nice about the Green Party and NDP platforms:

The contrast between the parties’ platforms is interesting: the Green ideas induce slightly more sheer nausea of the “literally everything in here is eye-slashingly horrible” kind, but at the same time there is a consoling breath of radicalism pervading Vision Green, a redeeming Small Is Beautiful spirit. At least, one feels, their nonsense is addressed to the individual. A typical laissez-faire economist would probably like the Green platform the least of the four on offer from national parties, but the Greens may be the strongest of all in advocating the core precept that prices are signals. At one point, denouncing market distortions created by corporate welfare, Vision Green approvingly quotes the maxim “Governments are not adept at picking winners, but losers are adept at picking governments.” (The saying is attributed to a 2006 book by Mark Milke of the Fraser Institute, but a gentleman named Paul Martin Jr. had uttered a version of it as early as 2000.)

That has always been the biggest failing of the regulatory view of politics: no matter how carefully you select the regulators, the regulated have many, many ways to (eventually) suborn them. Regulatory capture is the most common result, as the regulators become more closely attuned to the needs of their “charges” and work to protect them from competitors and social and technological change. What may have started as an attempt to rein-in over powerful industrial interests slowly becomes a de facto arm of government protection over the existing major players in that industry.

The New Democratic platform is more adult and serious than the Greens’ overall, which comes as no surprise. But it occurs to me, not for the first time this year, how much some folks love “trickle-down politics” when they are not busy denouncing “trickle-down economics”. How does Jack Layton hope to remedy the plight of the Canadian Indian? By “building a new relationship” with his politicians and band chiefs. How does he propose to improve the lot of artists? By flooding movie and TV producers, and funding agencies, with money and tax credits. He’ll help parents by giving money to day care entrepreneurs; he’ll sweeten the pot for “women’s groups” and “civil society groups”. One detects, perhaps mostly from prejudice, a suffocating sense of system-building, of unskeptical passion for bureaucracy, of disrespect for the sheer power of middlemen to make value disappear.

It’s useful to check who would be the actual beneficiaries of this kind of increased bureaucratization of life — and we’re generally not talking about the putative winners, but the actual ones — the ones who will staff the new agencies, bureaux, and commissions, the ones who will provide consulting services, and the ones who will study the results.

The Greens get a big thumbs-up from this corner for this particular clause of their platfom:

In 2008, according to the Treasury Board, Canada spent $61.3 million targeting illicit drugs, with a majority of that money going to law enforcement. Most of that was for the “war” against cannabis (marijuana). Marijuana prohibition is also prohibitively costly in other ways, including criminalizing youth and fostering organized crime. Cannabis prohibition, which has gone on for decades, has utterly failed and has not led to reduced drug use in Canada.

The Greens promise that cannabis would be removed from the schedule of illegal drugs and that the growth and sale of cannabis products would be regularized (and taxed), although with the usual shibboleth about the market needing to be restricted to small producers. If you’re making the stuff legal to sell, you shouldn’t try to micro-manage the product and producers you’re moving into the legal marketplace.

Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defence system in action

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:42

Strategy Page discusses the first use of the new Israeli anti-missile system to defend civilian targets last week:

Israel has deployed two batteries of its Iron Dome anti-missile system near the Gaza border. One is near the town of Beer Sheva (the largest town in the Negev desert) and another near the coastal city Ashdod (the largest city within range of 122mm rockets fired from Gaza). On April 7th, a 122mm rocket was intercepted near Ashkelon, which is south of Ashdod. This deployment was prompted by an increase in rockets fired from Gaza, and the growing use of longer range (20 kilometers) 122mm rockets. Iron Dome proved that it could work under combat conditions, preventing the longer range, factory made, rockets from landing in populated areas.

This is a big turnaround for this system. Four months ago, the Israeli military revealed that its new Iron Dome anti-rocket system was not meant for defending towns and villages, but military bases. For years, politicians touted Iron Dome as a means of defending civilians living close to rockets fired from Gaza in the south and Lebanon in the north. But it turns out that it takes about 15 seconds for Iron Dome to detect, identify and fire its missiles. But most of the civilian targets currently under fire from Gaza are so close to the border (within 13 kilometers) that the rockets are fired and land in less than 15 seconds. This means that the town of Sderot, the closest Israeli urban area to Gaza, cannot be helped by Iron Dome.

[. . .]

Iron Dome uses two radars to quickly calculate the trajectory of the incoming rocket (Palestinian Kassams from Gaza, or Russian and Iranian designs favored by Hezbollah in Lebanon) and do nothing if the rocket trajectory indicates it is going to land in an uninhabited area. But if the computers predict a rocket coming down in an inhabited area, a $40,000 guided missile is fired to intercept the rocket. This makes the system cost-effective. That’s because Hezbollah fired 4,000 rockets in 2006, and Palestinian terrorists in Gaza have fired over six thousand Kassam rockets in the past eight years, and the Israelis know where each of them landed. Over 90 percent of these rockets landed in uninhabited areas, and few of those that did caused few casualties. Still, a thousand interceptor missiles would cost $40 million. But that would save large quantities of military equipment and avoid many dead and injured troops. Israel already has a radar system in place that gives some warning of approaching rockets. Iron Dome will use that system, in addition to another, more specialized radar in southern Israel.

Next iPhone to be delayed into 2012?

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:27

According to sources at some of the various suppliers for key iPhone components, Apple may be delaying the next iPhone:

Analyst firm Avian Securities said that production of the iPhone 5 won’t begin till September, meaning a holiday launch at the earliest, or even a New Year’s debut.

The note, reported in Business Insider, is based on chats with key component suppliers, which support a consensus view that launch will be either a late 2011 or early 2012 event.

The note adds that a low-spec, low-price iPhone is also on the Apple roadmap, though exactly where on the roadmap is unclear.

This is surely a worrying development for the iPhone elite — not only could such a nano-iPhone divert some components, further pushing back the iPhone 5, but it would mean that “ordinary people” can get their hands on a fondleslab.

My own iPhone 3G is still holding up well (I’m not a particularly abusive owner), but I’ll finally be out of contract with Rogers in August, so the delay in the next iPhone release may increase the chances of me switching to an Android phone instead.

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