Quotulatiousness

June 17, 2010

Spain finds its “green” energy unsustainable

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Spain can’t afford to subsidize all those “green” jobs anymore:

Dead broke Spain can’t afford to prop up renewables anymore. The Spanish government is cutting the numbers of hours in a day it’s prepared to pay for “clean” energy.

Estimates put the investment in solar energy in Spain at €18bn — but the investment was predicated, as it is with all flakey renewables, on taxpayer subsidies. With the country’s finances in ruins, making sacrifices for the Earth Goddess Gaia is an option Spain can no longer afford. Incredibly, Spain pays more in subsidies for renewables than the total cost of energy production for the country. It leaves industry with bills 17 per cent higher than the EU average.

[. . .]

“Sustainability” has been the magic word that extracted large sums of public subsidy that couldn’t otherwise have been rationally justified using traditional cost/benefit measures. Spain paid 11 times more for “green” energy than it did for fossil fuels. The public makes up the difference. The renewables bandwagon is like a hopeless football team that finishes bottom of the league each year — but claims it’s too special ever to be relegated.

Of course, the lesson won’t be learned by other countries or regions . . . Ontario recently signed on to a similar kind of deal with Samsung. But Ontario taxpayers are getting a bargain: the jobs being created under this scheme will only cost $303,472, compared with the eye-watering $774,000 the Spanish jobs cost.

Get in on Cap & Trade now!

Filed under: Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

If you were hesitating about whether to get involved in Cap and Trade, hesitate no longer:

I have become a convert on the Cap And Trade thing. I am all in; pedal to the metal; go for broke; shoot the moon; a true fracking believer now.

This C&T shit has more revenue generating potential than prohibition ever did. You’ll generally be dealing with a better class of people who aren’t as inclined to settle their differences with machine guns, which is a big plus. Another big advantage over bootlegging is there’s no actual product involved, so all the usual logistics and end point sales issues involved with smuggling vanish.

It is truly a beautiful beautiful thing; even better than selling lots on the moon or mars, because the government doesn’t force people to buy real estate on the moon and mars.

If Al Capone were alive today, he’d be a carbon trader.

The RCMP: determined to shed that do-good reputation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

Matt Gurney looks at the explicitly non-apologetic “apology” offered by the RCMP to the mother of Robert Dziekanski, and points out that the RCMP is its own worst enemy:

So, let’s get this straight. Four Mounties jump a confused, helpless man, who could have almost certainly been dealt with by a Polish-speaking translator and a few kind words, and they Taser him repeatedly, and he dies screaming and kicking. Then they confiscate the tape of the event, and an inquiry into the incident reveals appalling attempts by officers to provide false statements and generally whitewash the whole debacle. And the best the RCMP can muster up is to say, “Gee, that’s a shame. But we’re not really sorry.”

As soon as the tape of four Mounties repeatedly shocking a defenceless man became public, the Mounties should have realized they’d dug themselves an enormous hole and swiftly apologized for this tragedy. Instead, they circled the wagons and did their best to deny what was blindingly obvious — that their officers acted too fast, too violently and then refused to allow the medics who arrived soon after to properly treat a man who was dying before their eyes. It was callous and horrible and has badly shaken the faith millions of Canadians have in their police force, a force now known for corruption and institutional arrogance as much as they are for their iconic red uniforms.

That a high-ranked official such as Deputy Commissioner Bass would sit before a press conference and mouth words of sympathy and apology to the mother of a dead man whilst simultaneously assuring his colleagues that he doesn’t mean a word of it is disgusting and will only add to the calls for a total overhaul of the RCMP. It is a bitter irony that his make-believe apology was given, of all days, on April Fool’s Day. What will the next revelation in this unfolding farce be? Were his fingers crossed, too?

Update, 18 June: The report on this incident has been released, and while it stops short of calling the RCMP officers murderers, it does call the Tasering “unjustified”.

“Most culture funding inevitably pays for crap”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:52

While providing some deeper explanation for the not-really-in-context sound bite provided by Alberta’s culture minister, Lindsay Blackett, Colby Cosh points out the truth of the matter:

The other knowledge that critics ought to be prepared to display is some familiarity with the material Blackett’s department actually funds. I figure you can’t say it’s not crap unless you’ve at least poked it with a stick. Can the indignant Paul Gross, who received $5.5 million from the Alberta taxpayer for Passchendaele, claim intimate familiarity with In a World Created by a Drunken God or Caution: May Contain Nuts or The Last Rites of Ransom Pride? If not, then why is he shooting off his mouth? It would surely be much more sensible for Gross and for like-minded critics to admit that most culture funding inevitably pays for crap — that the arts world is, in fact, a colossal pyramid of crap, inherently necessary to provide the nurturing and elevating environment from which a few items of permanent value might spring.

But that is something the culturati can never admit. Kirstine Stewart, the general manager of CBC’s English television operations, reacted in the Globe to Blackett’s comments by saying “Nobody can ever question the quality of what we do here in Canada, creatively or otherwise.” Surely this is a much more revealing and intriguing comment than Blackett’s. Does she mean that questioning the quality of Canadian television and film is literally impossible? Or just that criticism is inherently objectionable, a malum in se? And at the risk of appearing to take sides, I must ask: which attitude ultimately seems more healthy and likely to encourage improvement — Blackett’s, or Stewart’s?

Of course, a sensible government wouldn’t be spending any tax money on subsidies for TV and movie production (New Zealand’s most recent study showed a pretty big net loss for their various cultural tax breaks and subsidy programs).

June 16, 2010

You mean, the sky really isn’t falling?

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

Greg Swann has some advice for the new libertarian who may be inclined to panic over the current state of the world:

I’ve seen the gravely-predicted collapse of the starry firmament before. More than once. More than twice. More than a dozen times. It does seem plausible to me that the-world-as-we-know-it will someday come to an end. But with every passing day, I become more resolved in the belief that that day will not be tomorrow, regardless of the breathless weather reports.

It’s like this: New libertarians can be excitable. You’ve lived your whole life in an eyes-glazed-over sleep-walking state, and then, all at once, you wake up. The precipitant cause might be Atlas Shrugged or a John Stossel TV special or a reading from Jefferson on a radio talk show. Doesn’t matter, really. What matters is that you suddenly see the world as if had just been made, as if you had never seen it before. And you become acutely aware of the many defects in the way the world has been assembled.

That much is good, but, even so, in this state you are more than unusually likely to conclude that things are so bad that they are beyond repair. The timeline in Atlas Shrugged is only 13 short years, after all. How could we have shambled this far down The Road to Serfdom without being in imminent danger of being immediately enserfed?

H/T to Kathy Shaidle.

Monty explains it all for you

Filed under: Economics, Europe, France, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Financial worries? Fiscal imbalance? Debt woes? No problem! Monty has the answers (well, answers to some questions, even if they’re not the ones you’re interested in):

And the good news just keeps coming! Slumping cattle and lean-hogs futures may have bottomed out. Screw gold, man; I’m buying swine! (Monty, The Wasteland Bacon Baron. It has a nice ring to it. The potentate of pork! The sultan of swine! The High Lord of ham! The chitlin Chieftain!)

I’m not sure whether this is good news or not: Cramer calls yesterday’s big gain a sucker’s rally and advises people to get out. My rule of thumb is to treat anything Cramer says as the ravings of a lunatic. I consider him a shill and a buffoon. And yet . . . is this a Strange New Respect I’m feeling? Or just the dying embers of that burrito I ate for lunch yesterday?

French financial group AXA experiences a blinding glimpse of the obvious and exclaims, “Ze Euro eez doomed!”. Zut alors! (And no, I don’t know why French guys would be speaking English with a French accent instead of French.)

Spain and Portugal submit their austerity plans to the ECB and IMF. Plans include selling shoelaces at the airport, dancing for nickels, graft, corruption, and murder-for-hire. The ECB and IMF remain skeptical, and suggest that Portugal and Spain might want to look into selling the family silver or something.

And if all of that isn’t enough to get you assembling your Financial Apocalypse Survival kit, how about this?

More bond issues are being denominated in Canadian Loonies and Swiss Francs as investor skittishness regarding the Euro spreads. When investors choose something called the “Loonie” over your currency because it just sounds more stable somehow, dude, you got problems.

Policing for Profit

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

The irritating part of “mobile computing”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Cory Doctorow just got back from a book tour, but unlike all the other ones, he found this tour was both pleasant and productive, thanks to mobile computing:

I “rooted” my Nexus One, breaking into the OS so that I could easily “tether” it to my laptop, using it as a 3G modem between tour stops (we didn’t have to root my wife’s matching phone, as Google supplied us with an unlocked developer handset). My typical tour day started at 5am with breakfast and work on the novel, then a 6am interview with someone in Europe, then pickup, two to four school visits with a short lunch break, three or four interviews, then a bookstore signing or a plane (or both). As busy as that sounds, there’s actually a fair bit of dead time in it while sitting in the escort’s car, trying to find the next stop.

This time round, I plugged the laptop into the cigarette lighter and the phone into the laptop — this gave the phone a battery charge and the laptop internet access. And best of all, it meant that I could harvest those dead minutes to answer emails, keep on blogging, and generally stay abreast of things.

Which meant that I got lots more of the touring author’s most precious commodity: sleep. On previous tours, returning to the hotel meant sitting down for three to four hours’ worth of emails before bed, which cut my sleep time to less than four hours some nights.

So all is sweetness and light with modern mobile computing, yes? Not quite:

. . . the fundamental paradox of mobile — so long as the mobile carriers remain a part of mobile computing, it will only work for so long as you don’t go anywhere.

One of the more frustrating parts of travelling with my iPhone has been that I have to basically lobotomize it before crossing the border, reducing it from really powerful smart phone to a PDA with a phone line: the data and “roaming” charges are so high that it’s not economical to use them for anything other than an emergency. Just when being able to get driving directions or hotel or restaurant recommendations would be most useful — on the road or in an unfamiliar city — the cost is usually too high to justify turning on the damned feature.

Yes, you can hunt down wifi connections (and I did, on my last few trips to the US), but it hardly counts as convenient. The phone companies still assume anyone travelling with a smart phone is going to be spending their employers’ money and therefore won’t notice or care about the up-front costs.

Air pollution: unseen (and statistically unlikely) killer

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

Air pollution is bad, and the computer models used to determine how bad it is show that more than 100% of all deaths were due to pollution!

Air pollution cuts a deadly but invisible swath through Canada. We know this because the Canadian Medical Association says there were 21,000 deaths from exposure to air-borne pollutants in 2008. Of these, 2,682 Canadians were instantly struck down by the acute effects of pollution. By 2031, 710,000 people will have been slain by this unseen killer.

The evidence on this epic death toll is chillingly precise. According to the Ontario Medical Association, exactly 348 people died from air pollution in Waterloo Region in 2008. In Hamilton, 445 lives were cut short. And Manitoulin Island tragically lost 14 residents due to pollutants that year.

In Toronto, the Big Smoke of Canada, the figures are appropriately larger. Calculations by Toronto Public Health claim air pollution kills 1,700 people annually and sends 6,000 to the hospital. Ten percent of all non-trauma deaths in Toronto are directly attributed to air pollution.

Did you know that? I certainly didn’t. Oh, and wait . . . neither of us knew it because it’s junk scientific bullshit:

Consider what happens when you take Toronto’s computer model and use it to determine the death toll in previous eras, when the air was far more polluted than today. For example, average sulfur dioxide levels in downtown Toronto were more than 100 parts per billion in the mid-1960s. It’s now less than 10 ppb. No surprise then, that the death toll was much greater in the bad old days. Across the 1960s, half of all non-trauma deaths were the direct result of air pollution, according to Toronto’s model. And in February 1965, more than 100% of all deaths were due to pollution!

In other words, air pollution killed more people inside the computer model than actually died of all causes in the real world. How’s that for deadly?

I can confidently assure any modern day pollution-panicked worrier that things were much, much worse in the 1960s and 70s: the air was much more difficult to breathe in downtown Toronto, the water was disgustingly polluted, and (we were assured) things could only get worse in our little slice of environmental hell. The air is far less polluted now than at any time in my life, the lakes are largely recovered from the worst environmental damage we inflicted on them.

June 15, 2010

Instead of “Car!” they yell “Bylaw Officer!”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 18:25

Did you know that it’s against Toronto bylaws to play road hockey?

Ball hockey is played on streets across the city, but many people may be surprised to learn it’s not allowed.

Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker certainly was. He looked around the room today at the public works and infrastructure committee, which he chairs, and pointed out that he was likely surrounded by “bylaw violators”.

He said banning the sport on roads is “just plain silly”.

“I don’t want to fill up our jails with ten and 11-year-old children whose great crime was to run around with hockey sticks and orange balls, yelling the word car all the time,” he said. “Kids can play hockey on the Internet but then they stay inside by themselves and eat marshmallows.” Violating the city bylaw won’t get you thrown in jail, but it could net you a $55 fine.

The only good news about the bylaw is that it (to date) has never been enforced.

Why “Ideas having sex” is a good idea

Filed under: Books, Economics, Environment, Health, Liberty — Tags: — Nicholas @ 16:31

QotD: Public Education

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

As of 2006 — of course the numbers are out of date — 4,615,000 people were employed full-time by some 13,000 school districts (although if school districts used the same definition of “full-time” as the rest of us the number we’re talking about would be zero). Of these 4,615,000 there are 300,000 “clerical and secretarial staff” filling out No Child Left Behind paperwork and wondering why 64,000 “officials, administrators” aren’t doing it themselves, which they aren’t because they’re busy doing the jobs that 125,000 “principals and assistant principals” can’t because they’re supervising 383,000 “other professional staff” who are flirting with the 483,000 “teachers’ aides” who are spilling trail mix and low-fat yogurt in the teacher’s lounge making a mess for the 726,000 “service workers” to clean up, never mind that the students should be pushing the brooms and swinging the Johnny mops so at least they’d come home with a practical skill and clean the bathroom instead of sitting around comprehending 29 percent of their iPhone text messages and staying awake all night because they can only count 31 percent of sheep.

“Classroom teachers” number 2,534,000. That makes for a nationwide student/teacher ratio of 15.4:1, which compares reasonably with the 13.3:1 ratio in private schools and is an improvement over the 22.3:1 public school ratio in 1970, when kids still occasionally learned something. But the people-doing-who-knows-what/teacher ratio is getting close to 1:1.

P.J. O’Rourke, “End Them, Don’t Mend Them: It’s time to shutter America’s bloated schools”, Weekly Standard, 2010-06-21

This graphic is almost totally self-explanatory

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

A jaded viewer might note that the only “incoming” links were from the areas around Washington DC . . . they are from the government and they’re there to help.

By way of Paul Kedrosky’s blog.

June 14, 2010

Deadly would-be killers, or incompetent bumblers?

Filed under: Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

An interesting article in The Atlantic points out that the formidable image the media has bestowed upon Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations belies much of the reality:

To be sure, some terrorists are steely and skilled — people like Mohamed Atta, the careful and well-trained head of the 9/11 hijackers. Their leaders and recruiters can be lethally subtle and manipulative, but the quiet truth is that many of the deluded foot soldiers are foolish and untrained, perhaps even untrainable. Acknowledging this fact could help us tailor our counterterrorism priorities — and publicizing it could help us erode the powerful images of strength and piety that terrorists rely on for recruiting and funding.

Nowhere is the gap between sinister stereotype and ridiculous reality more apparent than in Afghanistan, where it’s fair to say that the Taliban employ the world’s worst suicide bombers: one in two manages to kill only himself. And this success rate hasn’t improved at all in the five years they’ve been using suicide bombers, despite the experience of hundreds of attacks — or attempted attacks. In Afghanistan, as in many cultures, a manly embrace is a time-honored tradition for warriors before they go off to face death. Thus, many suicide bombers never even make it out of their training camp or safe house, as the pressure from these group hugs triggers the explosives in suicide vests. According to several sources at the United Nations, as many as six would-be suicide bombers died last July after one such embrace in Paktika.

Many Taliban operatives are just as clumsy when suicide is not part of the plan. In November 2009, several Talibs transporting an improvised explosive device were killed when it went off unexpectedly. The blast also took out the insurgents’ shadow governor in the province of Balkh.

In the early 1980s, I remember reading a book (possibly Dean Ing’s Soft Targets), which made a strong case for the use of a very different anti-terrorism tactic: ridicule. Instead of investing these shadowy enemies with mystique and cunning, point out their all-too-human failings and poke fun at them for these weaknesses. An attribute of many fanatics is a total lack of any sense of humour or irony: this makes them very attractive foils for this kind of media counter-attack.

It’d be hard to come up with anything to make the Taliban appear more ridiculous than what they’re doing themselves:

If our terrorist enemies have been successful at cultivating a false notion of expertise, they’ve done an equally convincing job of casting themselves as pious warriors of God. The Taliban and al-Qaeda rely on sympathizers who consider them devoted Muslims fighting immoral Western occupiers. But intelligence picked up by Predator drones and other battlefield cameras challenges that idea — sometimes rather graphically. One video, captured recently by the thermal-imagery technology housed in a sniper rifle, shows two Talibs in southern Afghanistan engaged in intimate relations with a donkey. Similar videos abound, including ground-surveillance footage that records a Talib fighter gratifying himself with a cow.

I can haz bizness empire?

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:18

The New York Times discovers LOLcats:

Three years ago Ben Huh visited a blog devoted to silly cat pictures — and saw vast potential.

Mr. Huh, a 32-year-old entrepreneur, first became aware of I Can Has Cheezburger, which pairs photos of cats with quirky captions, after it linked to his own pet blog. His site immediately crumbled under the resulting wave of visitors.

Sensing an Internet phenomenon, Mr. Huh solicited financing from investors and forked over $10,000 of his own savings to buy the Web site from the two Hawaiian bloggers who started it.

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