Quotulatiousness

April 18, 2012

Another Conservative comes around on marijuana legalization

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

This time, it’s National Post columnist Barbara Kay accepting the arguments on legalization:

Tobacco is harmful in any amount and it remains perfectly legal. Alcohol, while benign in reasonable quantities, is a gateway to alcoholism — the most intractable and damaging of addictions — which causes far more domestic and social misery than marijuana possibly could. And finally, there comes a certain tipping point when resisting the common will for no easily defined reason stops making social or economic sense.

Two thirds of Canadians want marijuana to be decriminalized. It seems clear to me that sooner or later marijuana is going to join alcohol and tobacco as a substance that the government recognizes cannot be eradicated.

Unless the moral argument is too powerful to override — in this case it isn’t — economic realities can’t be ignored. The street value of the cannabis industry in British Columbia is worth an estimated $30-billion a year; it would be worth double or triple that amount if it could legally attract tourists from the U.S. and other countries. Enforcement of our present laws is said to cost $1-billion a year; that money could be put to better use by rehabilitating hard drug addicts. The federal government brings in about $5-billion annually in tobacco taxes; legalizing marijuana would bring in at least a billion or two more.

However, she’s still a Conservative (as the tax angle above clearly shows):

I’d like to see marijuana legalized, but highly regulated. The government should oversee its growth, its potency and its distribution. It should be heavily taxed, as all recreational substances that can be abused are. But I’m not naive. Because it wouldn’t be legally available to minors, and because the strength would be too muted for many potheads, a black market in more potent stuff would spring up immediately. Criminals will focus their efforts on marketing stronger, illegal marijuana to minors. And we shouldn’t be surprised if our First Nations suddenly discover that growing and selling pot are ancient traditions in their culture that exempt them from paying sales taxes.

Legalization will no doubt come with its own set of problems. Commercialization and widespread marketing will bring in masses of new users. And, as I’ve argued before, for accountability and liability purposes, legalization will embroil government, insurance companies, schools and the medicare system in such a tortuous maze of regulatory and enforcement interference with their privacy, that potheads — and the libertarians who see legalization as a liberating panacea — will yearn for the paradoxical simplicity of illegal, but unencumbered access.

Why do we even bother calling them “life sentences”?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:13

According to a recent Globe and Mail article, among the civil service jobs at risk in the government’s cutbacks are 26 convicted murderers who’ve been paroled and are paid to minister to another 2,280 paroled murderers (numbers from the 2010-11 report).

The Globe and Mail has learned that one of the many federal programs that will be cut in its entirety is LifeLine, a program aimed at helping people with life sentences — or “lifers” — successfully re-integrate into society once they’ve been paroled.

At a starting salary of about $38,000, the program hires and trains successfully-paroled lifers to mentor other lifers who are still incarcerated or who have been recently released on parole.

[. . .]

Under the Criminal Code, offenders serving a life sentence for murder may be considered for parole after serving 15 years of their sentences. Offenders serving life sentences for first-degree murder can be eligible for day parole after 22 years and full parole after 25 years.

A guerilla war is fought in two primary theatres: in the field and in the media

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

A survey of US experiences in guerilla fighting over the years at Strategy Page:

After a decade of fighting Islamic terrorists the U.S. Department of Defense finally realized, at the most senior levels, that the nature of, and progress in this war was being poorly presented to the national leadership and the public. Actually, from the very beginning, there was a reluctance to reveal the masses of data collected and how it was analyzed. Partly this was to prevent the enemy from realizing how much information on terrorist operations it possessed. But another reason was the fact that such a large mass of data could be interpreted many different ways, some of them unfavorable to the United States. Thus there was no “body count” or any other type of measure released by the Department of Defense. Internally, there were various metrics (measurements) presented to senior military and political leadership. The big problem was the use of aggregation (combining a lot of data together that should not have been combined). That was a problem that slowly became obvious over the last decade.

It’s now recognized that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere, like Yemen, Somalia, North Africa and so on) were all somewhat different and that context for each of them was crucial if you were going to analyze them. For example; al Qaeda is more of an idea than a centralized organization. Thus the al Qaeda found in each country, or part of a country, usually has different means and motivations. The war in Iraq was actually several separate wars going on at the same time, and occasionally interacting with other “wars” nearby. Same thing in Afghanistan and places like Somalia. Measuring progress is more accurate if you show the unique trends in all the different wars. Some of them ended early, some escalated and some are still in progress while others evolve into new kinds of conflicts. In other words, the military should use contextual assessment in reporting what is going on with guerilla conflict (or “irregular warfare” in general.)

[. . .]

When the United States first got involved with Vietnam in the late 1950s, there was good reason to believe American assistance would lead to the defeat of the communist guerilla movement in South Vietnam. That was because the communists had not been doing so well with their guerilla wars. In the previous two decades, there had been twelve communist insurgencies, and 75 percent of them had been defeated. These included Greek Civil War (1944-1949), Spanish Republican Insurgency (1944-1952), Iranian Communist Uprising (1945-1946), Philippine Huk War (1946-1954), Madagascan Nationalist Revolt (1947-1949), Korean Partisan War (1948-1953), Sarawak/Sabah “Confrontation” (1960-1966), Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), Kenyan Mau-Mau Rebellion (1952-1955). The communists won in the Cuban Revolution (1956-1958), the First Indochina War (1945-1954) and the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). The communists went on to lose the guerilla phase of the Second Indochina War (1959-1970). Guerillas make great copy for journalists. You know, the little guy, fighting against impossible odds. What we tend to forget (and the record is quite clear, and easily available), is that these insurgent movements almost always get stamped out. That does not make good copy, and the dismal details of those defeats rarely make it into the mass media, or the popular consciousness.

Summing up the career of Hunter S. Thompson, graphically

Filed under: Books, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

At BoingBoing, Mark Frauenfelder reviews Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson by Will Bingley and Anthony Hope-Smith:

180 pages isn’t much room to examine a life in minute detail. Instead, Bingley tells a story (as if it were written, quite convincingly, by Thompson himself) of Thompson’s frantic search to find meaning in the turbulent era he lived in. Bingley’s story is about a passionate, rebellious genius who sprinted too fast at the beginning of a long-distance race, collapsed early, and spent his remaining decades burnt-out, crawling bewilderedly.

The book’s forward, written by Thompson’s longtime editor, Alan Rinzler, is especially revealing. Rinzler believes that Thompson could have been the “heavyweight champion of American letters,” but his self-destructive behavior, which got worse with each passing year, ruined that opportunity.

[. . .]

After Lono, says Rinzler, “Hunter’s substance abuse, writer’s block and brief attention span were increasing exponentially. He’s slip out to see his dealer and come back so tanked he couldn’t think straight.” Thompson’s work became a series of “repetitious, mediocre, regurgitated articles and books and collections he allowed to be issued and reissued over the last 30 years of his life.”

The Curse of Lono was the last book by Thompson I read, but I don’t doubt Rinzler’s assessment of the quality of Thompson’s books that followed. (Thompson’s awful “Hey Rube!” columns for an ESPN website were enough to keep me uninterested in his newer books). But his earlier work, especially Hell’s Angels, is so good that I will always admire Thompson as a heavyweight contender who showed a very promising start.

I eagerly read much of Thompson’s early work (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, The Great Shark Hunt, Hell’s Angels, and The Curse of Lono) in the early-to-mid 80’s, but tapered off soon after that. Several years ago, I picked up a remaindered copy of Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk and it was the literary equivalent of Rome after too many Goth and Vandal sackings: you could still see some great bits and pieces, but everything else had been broken, burned, hacked, and slashed.

April 17, 2012

Chateauguay Magazine: a clear and present danger to the integrity of the French language in Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:45

Because it publishes with both French and English contents, the Quebec government’s language police have launched an investigation:

A monthly newsletter in the city of Chateauguay, Quebec, has caused a stir and it has nothing to do with its content. A resident complained there was too much English in the newsletter and now, Quebec’s language watchdog has launched an investigation.

The Office Quebecois de La Langue Francaise is looking into why the newsletter, called the “Chateauguay magazine,” is written in both French and English. The office says that’s a clear violation of the Charter of the French language, or Bill 101.

The office wants to ensure that the all the city’s communication with citizens is done only in the official language of French.

The folks in Chateauguay are apparently being oppressed because the magazine includes content addressed to the 26% of the population that speaks English.

Argentina’s latest economic lesson

Filed under: Americas, Economics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

Jan Boucek explains why Argentina is providing a helpful example to other countries on what not to do in economic policy:

This week, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner announced the seizure of Spanish oil company Repsol’s stake in Argentine oil company YPF to give the government 51% control. Spain is outraged and has recalled its ambassador. […]

Ms Fernandez justified her move on the grounds that YPF has failed to invest sufficiently to prevent Argentina from importing ever greater quantities of fuel. The fact that Argentine oil reserves have been dwindling means the sector needs greater and increasingly sophisticated investment to reach more complex structures, just like in the North Sea. Expropriation isn’t going to attract that kind of high-risk investment.

[. . .]

The YPF seizure continues Argentina’s cavalier attitude towards other people’s money shown back in 2008 when Ms Fernandez grabbed some $24 billion of private pension funds and used central bank reserves to meet debt payments. More recently, the country has been in a spat with the IMF over the quality of its statistics. Argentina claims inflation is running at somewhere between 5% and 11% but private independent estimates put the number at somewhere around 25%. The Economist is refusing to publish official Argentine inflation data.

Update: Well, regardless of the state of the economy, President Fernandez de Kirchner has a friend in the White House! President Obama has indicated his support for the Argentinian claim to … the ¿Maldives?

President Obama erred during a speech at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, when attempting to call the disputed archipelago by its Spanish name.

Instead of saying Malvinas, however, Mr Obama referred to the islands as the Maldives, a group of 26 atolls off that lie off the South coast of India.

The Maldives were a British protectorate from 1887 to 1965 and the site of a UK airbase for nearly 20 years.

The US Navy’s next destroyer will be the USS Lyndon B. Johnson

Filed under: History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

I guess they’re happy they don’t have to use that particular name on an aircraft carrier:

Strike one against the U.S.S. Lyndon Johnson: the Gulf of Tonkin incident. A confusing episode off the Vietnamese coast on August 2, 1964 resulted in a brief maritime skirmish with the North Vietnamese. The destroyer U.S.S. Maddox got shot; one of its aircraft was damaged. It was unclear who fired first. (A claimed follow-on engagement two days later was ultimately determined to have been a fiction.) Johnson’s administration, seeking an excuse to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam, portrayed the incident to Congress as a clear-cut act of North Vietnamese aggression. A decade later, the futile Vietnam war had claimed 57,000 American lives.

Strike two: Lyndon Johnson’s Naval war record was similarly dubious. As Johnson’s magisterial biographer, Robert Caro, documented in Means of Ascent, Johnson’s Naval commission in World War II was the result of string-pulling. (Johnson was a sitting congressman at the time; he sought a commission to bolster his political career.) His military career consisted of a single combat flight over the Pacific for which he received a Silver Star. For the next two decades, Johnson repeatedly exaggerated his tall tale of defying a Japanese Zero.

Strike three: the U.S.S. Lyndon Johnson will be a Zumwalt-class destroyer — a class of ship singled out by good-government watchdogs as an unaffordable boondoggle.

Buckyballs: the silver bullet for aging?

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

Well, it’s been shown to almost double normal lifespan … in rats. But in only one study so far:

In the current study researchers fed the molecule dissolved in olive oil to rats and compared outcomes to a control group of rats who got plain olive oil.

The main question they wanted to answer was whether chronic C60 administration had any toxicity, what they discovered actually surprised them.

“Here we show that oral administration of C60 dissolved in olive oil (0.8 mg/ml) at reiterated doses (1.7 mg/kg of body weight) to rats not only does not entail chronic toxicity,” they write “but it almost doubles their lifespan.”

“The estimated median lifespan (EML) for the C60-treated rats was 42 months while the EMLs for control rats and olive oil-treated rats were 22 and 26 months, respectively,” they write.

Using a toxicity model the researchers demonstrated that the effect on lifespan seems to be mediated by “attenuation of age-associated increases in oxidative stress”

SpaceX Dragon cleared for April 30 flight to ISS

Filed under: Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Brid-Aine Parnell updates the status of the SpaceX Dragon re-supply flight to the International Space Station at the end of the month:

The cargoship test flight, assuming it goes off without a hitch, will mark the first time a commercially made spacecraft has ever blasted off to visit the ISS.

NASA and SpaceX officials met yesterday in Houston for the Flight Readiness Review, a typical part of pre-launch prep at the agency, and confirmed that the Dragon and its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket were on track for the end of this month.

“Everything looks good heading to the April 30 launch date,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, in a canned statement.

The Dragon is due to blast off from Cape Canaveral at 12.22 EDT (16.22 GMT) carrying 1,200 pounds of cargo.

Because this is a test flight, the cargo isn’t critical stuff for the astronauts, but NASA and SpaceX are still hoping to see the ship fly close enough to the station for its robotic arm to grab it and berth it, which is the tricky bit.

Stephen Harper admits the current drug war approach is “not working”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:07

Okay, pretty pedestrian stuff for most Canadians, but an amazing admission for one of Canada’s foremost and outspoken drug warriors to make:

Harper met Canadian journalists and readily admitted differences over the exclusion of Cuba from the Latin summit. He admitted, too, to a disagreement over British rule in the Falkland Islands.

But he was not ready to agree that the division over drug policy is so clear-cut. Rather, he insisted that there is much agreement. Then came the most interesting quote of the day.

“What I think everybody believes,” Harper said, “is that the current approach is not working. But it is not clear what we should do.”

This would be intriguing from any prime minister. From Stephen Harper, whose government’s crime bill ratchets up the penalties for drug possession, it was startling.

But don’t worry, Conservative hard-liners: after that brief slip into honest talk about the ongoing failure of drug prohibition, he quickly rallied and got back to the standard drug warrior talking points:

Lest anyone think he’d undergone a conversion in Cartagena, Harper quickly added the other side of the story.

Drugs, he said, “are illegal because they quickly and totally — with many of the drugs — destroy people’s lives.”

Update: Chris Selley reads the tea leaves and thinks there’s a hint in Harper’s words that may indicate a slight improvement:

So, there’s the same old lunacy. Ending alcohol prohibition was a pretty “simple answer,” wasn’t it? One doesn’t hear many regrets about it nowadays. It is amazing that it still needs to be said, but one more time: Prohibition ensures the overall supply of any given drug will be far more dangerous, if not more addictive, than it would be otherwise. Criminals have only made as much money trafficking drugs, only killed as many scores of thousands of people as they have, because those drugs are illegal. And in light of this, cracking down on otherwise law-abiding people for growing and distributing small amounts of marijuana is patently insane.

Still, if we parse Mr. Harper’s words closely — perhaps too closely — we find him arguing that “many” drugs “destroy people’s lives,” which implies that some don’t. If the “current approach is not working,” as Mr. Harper says, and if “there is a willingness” to consider other approaches … well, what else can we possibly be talking about except, at the very least, lightening up on pot?

Most likely, of course, this was just situational rhetoric. If Mr. Harper was going to go temporarily squishy on drugs, it would be among presidents and prime ministers whose constituents are slaughtered to feed Mr. Harper’s constituents’ habits. Central and South American leaders grow weary of this, as you might imagine.

April 16, 2012

Member of the House of Lords offers £10 Million bounty for capturing Barack Obama and George Bush

Filed under: Britain, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

I’m not sure what they’re putting in the drinking water in the House of Lords, but whatever it is, it must be powerful:

During a recent visit to Pakistan, Lord Nazir Ahmed, a member of the British House of Lords who originally hails from Pakistani Kashmir, announced he was putting up a bounty of £10 million for the capture of U.S. President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush. The announcement, made at a conference held in the Pakistani town of Haripur, came in response to a recent U.S. announcement offering a $10 million reward to anyone providing information leading to the capture of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, founder of the Pakistani jihadi organization Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and emir of LeT’s charity arm, Jamaatud Dawa.[1]

Stressing the seriousness of his offer, Lord Ahmed said he would back the bounty at any cost, even if it meant selling his house. Qazi Muhammad Asad, minister for education in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government, was among those present at the conference at which the announcement was made.

Yes, it’s likely a fake story, but it’s too funny to check before running it.

Update: Oh, perhaps it’s a real story after all:

Lord Ahmed suspended from Labour Party after ‘offering £10m bounty for capture of Obama and Bush’

Lord Nazir Ahmed, 53, who in 1998 became the first Muslim life peer, was reported to have made the comments at a conference in Haripur in Pakistan.

A Labour Party spokesman said: “We have suspended Lord Ahmed pending investigation. If these comments are accurate we utterly condemn these remarks which are totally unacceptable.”

[. . .]

But Lord Ahmed complained that party chiefs had not spoken to him before announcing the move and challenged the party to produce evidence against him.

He had told the meeting that Mr Bush and ex-Labour prime minister Tony Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes however, he added, speaking from Pakistan.

[. . .]

Asked about the reported comments, he said: “I never said those words.

“I did not offer a bounty. I said that there have been war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan and those people who have got strong allegations against them — George W Bush and Tony Blair have been involved in illegal wars and should be brought to justice.

“I do not think there’s anything wrong with that,” he said — adding that he was equally concerned that anyone suspected of terrorism should face justice as well.

“This sort of investment pays for itself ten-fold over a very short period of time”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

You see? This is what’s wrong with private enterprise, especially in California. Those wimps aren’t willing to invest in something that will “pay for itself” ten times over in a “very short period of time”. That’s why all the greatest economic advances have come from over-aged students, business council speechifiers, bureaucrats, and career apparatchiks!

If you believe calling your opponents names is a sign that you have lost the argument, then this new high-speed rail commercial from the California Alliance for Jobs — in which unexpectedly macho proponents of the $41 billion, $110 billion, $98.5 billion, $68.4 billion high-speed rail project deride skeptics as “wimps” — is pretty much the end of the line […]

What reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of the high-speed rail project is not the insults but that what is supposed to be a rousing propaganda piece comes off like an orientation video for new hires at a failing company.

The video’s cast includes hacks respected citizens from Operating Engineers Local 3, including Alliance for Jobs Executive Director Jim Earp, along with leaders from what’s usually referred to as the “business community” whose skill sets cluster around serving on business councils rather than doing any actual business. There’s also a career apparatchik and the founder of the “I Will Ride” Student Coalition, who is apparently a UC Merced senior but looks at least a decade too old.

[. . .]

Again, why not just claim the Fresno-Bakersfield line will end up carrying 38 million people, the entire population of California, every day? It would be no less accurate than the current claims, which have been made with no data on ticket costs, no comparative studies of existing bullet-train ridership, or anything else that can reasonably pass for due diligence.

Oh, and nobody actually knows where the bullet train will go to or from. (Past, present and possibly future candidates include Corcoran, Borden, Fresno, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and some guy named Dave’s rec room.) You wouldn’t build a patio with the amount of planning that’s gone into the high-speed rail project.

To put the headline into a bit of perspective, note that only one high speed rail line in the world is profitable. This is an old hobby horse of mine and I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.

Update: And to answer the question about why parts of Europe, Japan, and China have high speed rail systems and neither Canada nor the United States do, here’s a brief overview I wrote last year:

The best place to build a high speed rail system for the US would be the Boston-New York-Washington corridor (aka “Bosnywash”, for the assumed urban agglomeration that would occur as the cities reach toward one another). It has the necessary population density to potentially turn an HSR system into a practical, possibly even profitable, part of the transportation solution. The problem is that without an enormous eminent domain land-grab to cheat every land-owner of the fair value of their property, it just can’t be done. Buying enough contiguous sections of land to connect these cities would be so expensive that scrapping and replacing the entire navy every year would be a bargain in comparison.

The American railway system is built around freight: passenger traffic is a tiny sliver of the whole picture. Ordinary passenger trains cause traffic and scheduling difficulties because they travel at higher speeds, but require more frequent stops than freight trains, and their schedules have to be adjusted to passenger needs (passenger traffic peaks early to mid-morning and early to mid-evening). The frequency of passenger trains can “crowd out” the freight traffic the railway actually earns money on.

Most railway companies prefer to avoid having the complications of carrying passengers at all — that’s why Amtrak (and VIA Rail in Canada) was set up in the first place, to take the burden of money-losing passenger services off the shoulders of deeply indebted railways. Even after the new entity lopped off huge numbers of passenger trains from its schedule, it couldn’t turn a profit on the scaled-down services it was offering.

Ordinary passenger trains can, at a stretch, share rail with freight traffic, but high speed trains cannot. At higher speeds, the actual construction of the track has to change to deal with the physical problem of safely guiding the fast passenger trains along the rail. Signalling must also change to suit the far-higher speeds — and the matching far-longer safe braking distances. High speed rail lines cannot be interrupted with grade crossings, for the safety of passengers and bystanders, so additional bridges and tunnels must be built to avoid bringing road vehicles and pedestrians too close to the trains.

In other words, a high speed railway line is far from being just a faster version of what we already have: it would have to be built separately, to much higher standards of construction.

Getting back to the California HSR line; it goes from A to B on this map:

Okay, you think, at least Fresno will get some snazzy slick rail service . . . except this section will be built but not operated until further connecting sections are built . . . at a later date. Maybe. It will be the track, including elevated sections through Fresno, and the physical right-of-way, but no electrical system to power the trains; but that’s fine, because the budget doesn’t include any actual trains.

Stephen Harper’s “world view is based on the premise that the United States is in relative decline as a superpower”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Eugene Lang has an interesting view of how Stephen Harper has changed since coming to power and how this is reflected in Canada’s foreign policies:

Stephen Harper became Prime Minister six years ago with little interest in or experience of international affairs. He was a domestic policy wonk — particularly interested in economic and fiscal affairs. Yet, in about half a decade, he has fashioned the clearest Canadian foreign policy posture in at least a generation, whether you like that posture or not. We can now speak of a Harper Doctrine which forms the cornerstone of our foreign relations.

In a largely ignored interview with Maclean’s magazine last summer, the Prime Minster stated: “We also know, though, the world is becoming more complex, and the ability of our most important allies, and most importantly the United States, to single-handedly shape outcomes and protect our interests, has been diminishing, and so I’m saying we have to be prepared to contribute more, and that is what this government’s been doing.”

These remarks are an important insight into the Prime Minister’s perception of the changes in America’s geopolitical position, and how Canada should respond. They suggest his world view is based on the premise that the United States is in relative decline as a superpower, and that Canada must step up to the plate to help our distressed ally police the world. It is a striking acknowledgement. And it was not just words.

Canada has been needing to diversify its trading relationships to reduce its dependence on, and exposure to, the vagaries of the US economy and the meddling of the US government. President Obama’s recent decision to veto the Keystone XL pipeline is merely the latest spur to get Canada to work more closely with China and other growing economies rather than be subject to presidential whim in our dealings with the US.

During his first half-decade in office Stephen Harper was putting most of Canada’s economic eggs in the American basket, as had his predecessors — from Brian Mulroney to Jean Chrétien to Paul Martin. The Prime Minister was accused of willfully ignoring unprecedented economic opportunities in China.

But that is a thing of the past. Over the last year, the Harper government has embarked on the most ambitious trade and economic diversification agenda in memory. Ottawa is now pursuing free trade agreements with India and the European Union simultaneously. The government has done a 180 on Chinese trade and investment, actively and aggressively pursing both. Canada is trying hard to become a member of the Trans Pacific Partnership, a multi-lateral free trade agreement centred in Asia. And now Canada has begun free trade negotiations with Japan, the world’s third largest economy. Little of this was on Ottawa’s radar screen 18 months ago.

It’s my opinion that the US economy is being held back at least in part because of fears of what the federal government may do — instead of smoothing the worries of business, the government is stoking them and adding to the uncertainties that make business decision-making less bold. The more regulatory changes the government makes (or even hints that it might make), the less investment will be made in areas that might be affected by those changes. The current presidential election campaign with its naked fanning of class warfare isn’t helping the situation either.

Since the global financial crisis, the evidence has mounted that the United States is in economic decline. Its system of government seems congenitally incapable of coming to grips with America’s fiscal crisis. For the first time in living memory, the U.S. recovery from recession has been weaker than Canada’s. The United States continues to have a higher unemployment rate than Canada, virtually unheard of historically. The American economy is amazingly resilient and might yet come back strong, but right now the evidence suggests a long period of relative economic stagnation south of the border. This is the most important structural change affecting Canada since Stephen Harper became Prime Minister.

A more sensible way to analyze the F-35 issue

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

In the National Post, Shaun Francis and John Kelleher offer an easier-to-understand method of analyzing the costs and benefits of the F-35 program:

Consider a car. Let’s say you’re considering buying a subcompact or an SUV, which you plan to hold onto for five years. A subcompact has a one-time purchase cost of $20,000 followed by $7,000 in annual, recurring costs on things like gas and maintenance. Your total costs over five years are therefore $55,000, or $11,000 average cost/year.

Meanwhile, the SUV has a one-time purchase cost of $25,000 and recurring costs of $7,500, leading to a five-year total cost of $62,500, or $12,500 average total cost/year.

To examine whether buying an SUV makes sense, you take the costs of the SUV and you subtract the costs of your next best alternative, the subcompact. Then you ask yourself, is it worth a premium of $1,500 per year to drive an SUV versus a subcompact?

From a decision point of view, it doesn’t make sense to get upset over the $62,500 total cost of the SUV. That’s not the pertinent figure here. You can’t walk to work. You need a car. So the pertinent question is the cost differential — in this example the $7,500 premium between your preferred choice and the next best option.

Canada’s F-35 decision should have been framed in a similar fashion by the Auditor General. The appropriate question? Do we want to pay a premium for the world’s best fighter jet, which will be cutting edge for decades to come, or can we make do with more reasonably priced planes that are bound to become obsolete sooner?

In the article they say “no one is questioning whether Canada needs fighter jets”, which is not actually true. Significant portions of the NDP, the Greens, and even some Liberals feel we should not be buying any military equipment that does not have a primarily humanitarian use. In their view, transport aircraft might be acceptable but combat aircraft would not. Trucks, yes, but tanks, no.

India’s long, twisting path to nuclear submarine capabilities

Filed under: India, Military, Russia, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

India would like to run their own nuclear-powered submarines, but it’s taken longer for them to achieve that than they’d hoped:

On April 4th the new Russian Akula II SSN (nuclear attack submarine) Nerpa, that was supposed to be delivered to India (which is leasing it) two years ago, was finally turned over. It’s worse than it sounds. Three years ago, during sea trials there was an equipment failure on Nerpa that killed 20 sailors and shipyard workers. This delayed sea trials for many months and the Russians found more items that needed attention. These additional inspections and repairs continued until quite recently.

[. . .]

Indian money enabled Russia to complete construction on at least two Akulas that were less than half finished at the end of the Cold War. This was another aftereffect of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Several major shipbuilding projects were basically put on hold (which still cost a lot of money) in the hopes that something would turn up. In this case, it was Indians with lots of cash. But money could not overcome the construction problems and poor design decisions the Russians made. The single Akula II India was leasing was delayed again and again. The 8,100 ton Akula II has a crew of 73. The one leased by India has eight 533mm (21 inch) torpedo tubes and 40 torpedoes.

Meanwhile, in 2009, India launched its first nuclear submarine, the INS Arihant (Destroyer of Enemies). This came after over a decade of planning and construction. What was not revealed at the times was that the Arihant was launched without its nuclear reactor, which was not installed until 2011. Arihant is supposed to be ready for service later this year.

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