October 13, 2011
Canadian liberty: “The entitlement to consume milk, raw or otherwise, is not a Charter-protected right”
Karen Selick reports on a recent court decision that shows just how far Canadians’ liberties are constrained by the judiciary:
Dairy farmer Michael Schmidt has been campaigning to legalize the sale of raw (unpasteurized) milk for 17 years. In 2010, he was acquitted on 19 charges by a justice of the peace who ruled that “cow sharing” was a legitimate way to provide raw milk to informed consumers who don’t live on farms.
On Sept. 28, a judge reversed portions of that decision and found Schmidt guilty on 13 charges.
But the judge ventured beyond the subject of raw milk, saying: “The entitlement to consume milk, raw or otherwise, is not a Charter-protected right.”
The implications are far reaching. If the judge is right about this, future courts could similarly declare that you have no right to eat meat, poultry, seafood, fruit, vegetables or grains, even if government approved. In short, you may have no right to eat anything at all.
[. . .]
In one very technical sense, the courts’ statements are accurate: There is no specific reference to milk, or indeed, any food in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the U.S. Bill of Rights. But both documents are equally silent about any right to get out of bed in the morning, to stretch, to brush your teeth, to use the bathroom, to put on clothes. If constitutions had to enumerate every single thing that North Americans normally consider themselves free to do, they would be a zillion pages long.
Instead, the people who drafted these constitutional documents used a simple shortcut to eliminate the zillion pages. They said that people had the right to liberty.
The Charter was, after all, designed to rein in government, not to rein in individuals. It did not purport to grant us our rights or freedoms; rather, it recognized that those freedoms already existed. It guarantees in its very first section that the state may not infringe on our freedoms except by “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
BBC’s Top Gear GPS deal violates BBC’s own rules
Due to editorial rules, a Top Gear-branded GPS using Jeremy Clarkson’s voice will be withdrawn:
The BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, will now will now donate all proceeds from the sales to Children In Need to bypass rules that prevent the show’s presenters endorsing motoring products.
The Top Gear satnav features Clarkson giving instructions in typically sardonic style — amusing for Top Gear fans, no doubt, but it may begin to grate on the 100th journey.
“Keep left — if you’re not sure which side left is you really shouldn’t be on the road,” he tells drivers.
“After 700 yards, assuming this car can make it that far, you have reached your destination, with the aid of 32 satellites and me — well done.”
The corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, said no more of the Top Gear satnavs, made by TomTom, would be produced.
A plan to allow existing TomTom owners to download Clarkson’s voice to update their models has now been dropped.
Given how many people have complained about the default voices provided with their GPS units, I can see why adding Jeremy Clarkson’s dulcet tones to the mix could hardly have made the situation any worse.
October 12, 2011
“There is no off-the-shelf exam [that can] detect sociopathic killers”
Michael Friscolanti explains how former Colonel Russell Williams managed to avoid coming to the attention of the police for so long:
An elite officer who piloted prime ministers and the Queen—and oversaw the country’s largest air force base—was doubling as a depraved sexual predator who somehow managed to ascend the ranks without a whiff of suspicion. Grasping for an explanation, the Canadian Forces launched an “immediate review” of the way candidates are selected for senior command positions—and whether enhanced psychological testing might have revealed the real Russ Williams.
The answer, sadly, is no. Among hundreds of pages of internal military documents, obtained by Maclean’s under the Access to Information Act, is a draft version of that review. It confirms what leading experts have long maintained: there is no off-the-shelf exam that employers, armed forces or otherwise, can use to detect sociopathic killers. “Given the recent events in CFB Trenton, it is natural for the CF to question whether or not the organization could have identified a sexual sadist or predicted that an individual would become a serial sexual murderer,” the report says. But that “would be unrealistic to expect.”
Every recruit is subject to various levels of screening, including a criminal records check and an aptitude test. Members also undergo an annual evaluation that assesses past performance and potential for promotion. To be considered for senior command (colonels in the army and air force; captains in the navy), an officer’s file must be “thoroughly reviewed” and endorsed by a board of superiors who examine “personal characteristics, demonstrated leadership ability, education and professional development.” Nothing in Williams’s file, an impeccable 23-year career, offered the slightest hint of his alter ego.
So, if it wasn’t Wall Street, then who inflated the US housing bubble anyway?
Peter Wallison has the answer:
Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities. The original legislative quota was 30%. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development was given authority to adjust it, and through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations HUD raised the quota to 50% by 2000 and 55% by 2007.
It is certainly possible to find prime borrowers among people with incomes below the median. But when more than half of the mortgages Fannie and Freddie were required to buy were required to have that characteristic, these two government-sponsored enterprises had to significantly reduce their underwriting standards.
Fannie and Freddie were not the only government-backed or government-controlled organizations that were enlisted in this process. The Federal Housing Administration was competing with Fannie and Freddie for the same mortgages. And thanks to rules adopted in 1995 under the Community Reinvestment Act, regulated banks as well as savings and loan associations had to make a certain number of loans to borrowers who were at or below 80% of the median income in the areas they served.
The “Ontario education system [is] a remarkably clean and ongoing experiment in the effects of school choice”
Stephen Gordon explains why Ontario’s two parallel school systems are helping to prove the efficacy of school choice:
Public funding for the Ontario separate school system is sometimes a controversial topic for reasons I won’t get into here. But by offering one set of parents with the choice of which school they can send their children, the Ontario education system has set up a remarkably clean and ongoing experiment in the effects of school choice. Catholics have the choice of sending their elementary-school aged children either to separate or to public schools, and non-Catholics do not have this choice.
Elementary school administrators in the two systems face very different constraints:
- Public schools have a monopoly on non-Catholics who can’t afford private school.
- Separate schools face a clientele that always has the option of switching to the public school system.
Of the two, separate school administrators have the greater incentive to provide higher-quality education: if the separate system were widely known to be dysfunctional, it would likely disappear.
Basic economics would predict that the competitive pressures on separate school administrators would provide stronger incentives to provide better education outcomes. And that seems to be just what is happening. A recent study (pdf) by McMaster University economists Martin Dooley and Abigail Payne in collaboration with UC-Berkeley’s David Card that examine these effects finds “a statistically significant but modest-sized impact of potential competition on the growth rate of student achievement.” In a related study using similar data, a CD Howe study done by Wilfrid Laurier’s David Johnson finds that of the 13 ‘above-average’ school boards, 11 are in the separate school system, while none of the 10 ‘below-average’ school boards are.
Britain decides not to follow German lead on nuclear power
Unlike their European partners, Britain will continue to depend on nuclear power to provide a large part of their electricity needs:
Britain breathed a collective sigh of relief yesterday. The question on everyone’s lips had been answered. Following the Fukushima accident in Japan, was it safe to continue using nuclear power here in the UK? The answer from chief nuclear inspector Mike Weightman and his team, who had spent months undertaking research, was ‘yes’.
Of course, that finding didn’t actually come as a shock to anyone. And not just because the interim report, published earlier in the year, had already made it clear that the UK nuclear-power industry could learn few new lessons from the accident in Japan — but also because you didn’t need a PhD in nuclear-reactor design to recognise the Fukushima disaster was a unique situation that arose in an area of the world prone to earthquakes and tsunamis with a different, older model of nuclear-power station than that used in the UK. A similar event would be highly unlikely here, or anywhere in Europe, and existing safety regulations are extremely tight. Furthermore, despite the full force of nature being thrown at the outdated Fukushima plant — an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale leading to tsunami waves up to 40.5 metres high — the disaster was largely contained and, to date, not a single individual has died from the radiation that leaked out.
[. . .]
Despite their best attempts to win over new recruits, the tiny handful of aging anti-nuclear protesters saw no swell in numbers, no matter how they tried to draw comparisons between the European situation and the disaster in Japan. Despite holding vigils and undertaking stunts, such as releasing balloons outside a nuclear-power plant symbolising how many days it had been since the disaster, hardly any of their planned ‘wave of protests’ were deemed newsworthy or interesting.
Actually, UK public opinion has shifted in favour of nuclear power. The results of a Populus poll published last month revealed that 41 per cent of the population believed the benefits outweigh the risks, a three per cent increase on the previous year; 54 per cent wanted more nuclear-power stations or at least the replacement of existing stations with new ones. There was, in fact, an eight per cent drop (to 28 per cent) in people opposing nuclear power, compared to 2010.
Changing opinions about pornography
Anna Arrowsmith points out that what we “know” about porn ain’t necessarily so:
Since Andrea Dworkin wrote about pornography as being anti-women in the early 1980s, we have become acclimatised to the idea that porn is bad for us, and must only be tolerated due to reasons of democracy and liberalism. In the past 30 years this idea has largely gone unchallenged outside academia and, in the process, feminism has been conflated with the anti-porn position. We have effectively been neuro-linguistically programmed to equate porn with harm.
Not only is there no good evidence to support this view, but there is a fair amount of evidence to support the opposite. This is the problem with the opt-in proposal: only the reportedly negative results from porn have been considered. But porn is good for society.
Women’s rights are far stronger in societies with liberal attitudes to sex — think of conservative countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen or China, and the place of women there. And yet, anti-porn campaigners neglect such issues entirely. A recent study by the US department of justice compared the four states that had highest broadband access and found there was a 27% decrease in rape and attempted rape, and the four with the lowest had a 53% increase over the same period. With broadband being key to watching porn online, these figures are food for thought for those who believe access to porn is bad news.
October 11, 2011
The famous British wartime poster that was never used
There’s a fascinating story posted at The Awl discussing the trademark battle over the famous “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster from the British Ministry of Information during World War 2. The most interesting part of the article, in my opinion, is that the poster was never used during the war:
The Keep Calm and Carry On poster was designed and produced by the British government in 1939 in advance of the war, but it was never displayed in a single English tube station or tobacconists or newsagents. Not one ordinary citizen ever saw it in the street before or during the war.
Of the 2.5 million posters originally printed, only a handful survived the war; all the rest were pulped. Exactly two copies are known to have made it into private hands. One of these is owned by Wartime Posters of Warrington, Cheshire. The other is Stuart Manley’s.
A very few more are held in government museums, such as the Imperial War Museum, whose website observes, “And remember the most important wartime tip of all: Keep Calm and Carry On.” Haha, not even! Hardly anyone had ever seen that thing before 2001!!
[. . .]
Early in 1939, it was clear that war was all but inevitable. The precursor organization to the Ministry of Information swung quietly into gear at that time, and began work on five million posters to plaster all over the place and improve citizen morale. Not everybody was on board with crafting public messaging before it was clear how things were going to shake out, but the dissenters were overruled and the project went forward.
But the war didn’t begin the way they expected. The period from late 1939 to early May of 1940 was known as the Phoney War because the Germans had invaded Poland with such a lot of Blitzkrieg that everyone in Britain and France expected pretty much the same thing for themselves. But that did not happen, and wags took to calling this period the Sitzkrieg and so on, and that went on until the Germans marched into France and the Low Countries. It took until autumn of 1940 for the London Blitz to begin.
Meanwhile, Sitzkrieg or no, the MoI was lumbering onward. The first two posters produced in 1939 were: “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory” and “Freedom is in Peril: Defend It With All Your Might.” Two and a half million of the third were printed. They read, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” and these last were held back in anticipation of the rain of bombs that was expected the moment war broke out. They were meant for a crisis that didn’t in the event occur. For that and a few other reasons, the British public never saw them.
iPhone 4S shows big drop in standby time claims
The Guardian wonders why, if all the other claims for iPhone 4S performance show improvement over the iPhone 4, the standby time has dropped so precipitously:
Here’s a puzzle: where, or how, did the iPhone 4S drop 100 hours’ standby time?
According to official figures on Apple’s site for the phone, it has a standby time of 200 hours (that’s 8 days and 8 hours). That’s a long time. But it’s much less than the 250 hours quoted for Apple’s first effort at its own phone, the iPhone in 2007 — and it’s far less than the 300 hours given for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. (See the iPhone comparison page on Apple’s site.)
Other battery life figures quoted by Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller during his presentation at Cupertino included lots of data about the new phone (on which the new Siri voice assistant is impressive), and its battery life: 8 hours of 3G talk time, 14 hours of 2G talk time, 6 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, 9 hours of Wi-Fi browsing.
Other battery life statistics for the iPhone 4S’s battery life — 3G talk time, 2G talk time, 3G internet browsing, video playback — are the same or better, apart from the Wi-Fi browsing, which is given at nine hours for the 4S, and 10 for the iPhone 4.
I would note that I never found the iPhone 3G real world performance to be anything close to the claimed 300 hours: 72-96 hours would take my iPhone from full charge to redline. As a rule, I shut down my phone overnight, because it didn’t make sense to leave it on standby using up a significant proportion of the battery while I was sleeping.
And just because I still love Joey deVilla‘s explanation of the prospective iPhone 4S customer dilemma, here it is again:
Stephen Gordon: There is no case for Canada to “do something” about jobs
One of the side-effects of living right next door to the US is that Canadians often have more information about the state of the economy in the US than they do about their own economy. Calls for the federal government to “do something” about jobs is a good example:
But it doesn’t make much sense for Canada to ‘do something’ about job creation because of problems in the U.S. labour market. Why would anyone look at U.S. data and go on to infer that the rate of job creation in Canada requires a policy response?
[. . .]
The best proxy I’ve been able to find for the hiring rate is the number of workers who have been at their current jobs for less than three months. Movements in the number of people hired should show up here, albeit with a certain lag. As far as I can make out [. . .] the hiring rate fell significantly in 2009, but returned to trend in 2010. The data from 2011 are consistent with those of the boom years of 2005-2007.
Calling for the government to ‘do something’ about job creation when hiring rates are already at pre-recession levels is puzzling. At best, it is a demand that the government undertake busy work: activities that achieve little beyond demonstrating that it is ‘doing something’. And judging from the response, it is also a demand that the government is happy to meet.
“Fat taxes” are doomed to failure
Patrick Basham and John Luik handily dismiss the potential of government-imposed “fat taxes” on certain foods as tools to reduce obesity or to change peoples’ food choices:
The obesity crusaders’ argument is that a fat tax will reduce junk-food consumption, and thereby improve diets and overall public health. There are many reasons, however, to suspect that a fat tax would be at best unsuccessful, and at worst economically and socially harmful.
For example, scientifically rigorous evidence suggests that higher prices do not reduce soft-drink consumption. There are no studies demonstrating a difference either in aggregate soft-drink consumption or in child and adolescent body mass index (BMI) between jurisdictions with soft-drink taxes and those without such taxes.
[. . .]
These results are confirmed in a study by Christiane Schroeter in the Journal of Health Economics which examined the link between food prices and obesity. The study concluded that while increasing the price of high-calorie food might lead to decreased demand for these foods, ‘it is not clear that such an outcome will actually reduce weight’.
Why do fat taxes fail? The economic answer is that demand for food tends to be largely insensitive to price. Considerable research on food prices has demonstrated this inelasticity. A 10 per cent increase in price, for instance, reduces consumption by less than one per cent.
[. . .]
Furthermore, fat taxes have perverse, unintended consequences. According to the US government’s Economic Research Service, another unintended consequence of a fat tax on consumer behaviour is that taxes on snack foods could lead some consumers to replace the taxed food with equally unhealthy foods. Adam Drewnowksi similarly found that poorer consumers react to higher food prices not by changing their diets, but by consuming even fewer ‘healthy’ foods, such as fruits and vegetables, and eating more processed foods.
A Danish study confirmed this problematic outcome, finding that sin taxes on junk foods would fail to reduce consumption by the population (that is, the poor) who consume these foods most frequently. Additionally, it found that taxes levied on sugar content — the basis for the soft-drinks tax — would increase saturated fat consumption.
NFL week 5 results
The Vikings finally got a win, but my predictions drop a bit towards average, still maintaining that logjam for third place in the Ace of Spades HQ Yahoo! group. This was the first bye week, so only 13 games were played:
√ Philadelphia 24 @Buffalo31
√ @Indianapolis 24 Kansas City 28
√ @Minnesota 34 Arizona 10
∅ @New York (NYG) 25 Seattle 36
∅ @Pittsburgh 38 Tennessee 17
√ New Orleans 30 @Carolina 27
∅ @Jacksonville 20 Cincinnati 30
∅ @Houston 20 Oakland 25
∅ @San Francisco 48 Tampa Bay 3
√ San Diego 29 @Denver 24
√ @New England 30 New York (NYJ) 21
√ Green Bay 25 @Atlanta 14
√ @Detroit 24 Chicago 13
This week 8-5 (6-7 against the spread)
Season to date 51-26
