Quotulatiousness

November 18, 2012

UK voters turning against EU in latest polling

Filed under: Britain, Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

In the Guardian, Daniel Boffey and Toby Helm report on the rising tide of anti-EU sentiment among British voters:

Well over half of British voters now want to leave the European Union, according to an opinion poll that shows anti-EU sentiment is sweeping through all three main political parties.

The Opinium/Observer survey finds that 56% of people would probably or definitely vote for the UK to go it alone if they were offered the choice in a referendum. About 68% of Conservative voters want to leave the EU, against 24% who want to remain; 44% of Labour voters would probably choose to get out, against 39% who would back staying in, while some 39% of Liberal Democrats would probably or definitely vote to get out, compared with 47% who would prefer to remain in the EU.

The findings will make sobering reading for all three major parties, which are at risk of losing support to the buoyant anti-EU party Ukip — now two points ahead of the Lib Dems on 10%.

Overall just 28% of likely voters think the EU is a “good thing” while 45% think it is a “bad thing”. The 18-34 age group is the only one in which there is a clear majority backing the EU, with 44% saying membership is good, against 25%.

The Two Scotts psycho-analyze the New York Jets

Filed under: Football, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

Scott Reid and Scott Feschuk try to explain the New York Jets:

New York Jets (plus 3) at St. Louis

Scott Feschuk: The New York Jets have done the impossible: they’ve made me feel sorry for Tim Tebow. Here we have a team that’s 3-6 — a team that over the past two weeks has been blown out by Seattle and Miami… a team that stops the run about as well as Kevin James stops at eating just a couple of your fries… a team that insists on starting a quarterback who plays like a kid dressed up for Halloween as an NFL quarterback — and all week this team devoted its energy to debating whether its backup QB, who hardly ever plays, is or is not “terrible?” Here’s the hard truth: the Jets have tuned out Rex Ryan. They need to make a change. You know who should coach this team? That Jill Kelley lady from the David Petraeus sex scandal.

She seems to be able to make grown men do anything. Within minutes of meeting her, FBI agents are ripping off their shirts and army generals are sending off lewd email messages about their four-star boners. Surely, if anyone could get Mark Sanchez to throw the ball in the general direction of someone — anyone — in green, it’d be her. Pick: St. Louis.

Scott Reid: Pro-tip for you buddy — it’s not all that difficult to get army generals talking about their boners. In fact, military men can be included in a rather exclusive list of male-dominated professions that can be easily coaxed into talking online about their wood. This group includes, but is not necessarily limited to: doctors, lawyers, door-to-door salesmen, pastry chefs, magazine editors, cabinet ministers, air conditioner repairmen, director Kevin Smith, certified management accountants, video game designers (especially video game designers!), piano instructors, hot air balloonists, dairy farmers, astronauts, union leaders, clergymen, tutorial assistants, pipe fitters (no surprise there), air traffic controllers, official team mascots, building inspectors, glass blowers, financial regulators and whatever the hell it is that you call what we two do for a living. The real trick, in fact, is to get us men NOT to talk about our boners. How? Actually that was a ruse. There is no way to get us not to talk about our boners. But the wise among us do know better than to do it via email with chicks who suffer from “f-ing crazy big-eyes syndrome.”

Of course, none of these human failings afflict Tim “Mr. Vanilla” Tebow. You know, maybe a little dirty-talk over the interweb would help Tim straighten out his skinny post (and yes, I’m speaking metaphorically). Pick: St. Louis.

Having (in)famous ancestors

Filed under: History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:40

John Scalzi is having mixed reactions to all the Twitter updates about Lincoln and theatres:

And he wrote about his infamous relative a few years ago:

Every family should have an interesting skeleton in the family closet. In my family, it’s John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, who, of course, was the President of the United States during the American Civil War. Booth assassinated Lincoln not long after the cessation of hostilities between the Union and the Confederacy, by sneaking into the President’s box at Ford’s Theater (the show: Our American Cousin) and shooting him in the back of the head with a pistol. Booth then leaped from the box to the stage, shouting “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus it is with tyrants”) and “The South is avenged.” He broke his leg but managed to escape nevertheless. However, eleven days later, he was discovered in a barn, burned out, and then shot (by himself or by a soldier, it’s unclear). He died shortly thereafter. Some maintain that Booth’s body was never positively identified, so it’s possible he actually escaped. Either way, he’s dead now.

For the record, I’m not a direct descendant — my line goes through one of his nine other siblings, making him something along the lines of a great-great-great-great-great-grand-uncle. Whenever I mention my relationship to him, though, people’s eyes get wide, their jaws go momentarily slack, and some people actually back up a step, as if a long dormant assassination gene might suddenly fire up, and they’d be the unlucky recipient. I get a kick out of that. Then I go for the extra point my mentioning that John Wilkes and I have the same birthday: May 10, 131 years apart. By the time I mention I get edgy handling pennies and five dollar bills, people begin to wend their way to the nearest door.

Rand Paul versus Gary Johnson

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

The question is who will take on the role that Ron Paul is stepping down from — unofficial leader of the libertarian movement. Christopher McDaniel thinks that Gary Johnson is the right man for the job:

So who will take up the mantle for Ron Paul’s movement? Who is most likely to be the one that takes liberty to the next level? Conventional wisdom would say that his son, Senator Rand Paul (R-K.Y.) makes the most sense. He has maintained a voting record that is generally consistent with his father’s record. The main source of contention among Paul supporters, however, was Rand’s willingness to endorse Mitt Romney in the general election. While Rand’s decision was likely motivated by a promise to speak at the GOP Convention, and thus political exposure nationally, many of his father’s constituents feel like Rand deserted his father just when he was needed most. Despite his exposure from the convention, Rand has to deal with big stars in the GOP like Marco Rubio and Chris Christie. It seems unlikely to me that Rand Paul can make a serious run at the presidency from inside the GOP.

[. . .]

Gary Johnson is the one I see galvanizing the liberty contingent and make real inroads in the political system for the Libertarian Party. He managed to garner 1% of the popular vote in 2012 despite really only gaining traction in September and October. Gary has an excellent resume. He is a very successful businessman who won successive terms as governor of New Mexico, a decidedly Democrat heavy state, as a Republican. One of the more popular numbers that Johnson advocates like to point out is that he took a $500 million deficit in New Mexico and made it a billion dollar surplus by the time he left office. Unlike Paul and Amash, Johnson left the Republican Party and has committed to the Libertarian Party for the future. Johnson does not come without his detractors, however. Most notably, hardcore Republicans do not like the fact that he is pro-choice and for repeal of DOMA. However, as Johnson puts it, “I’m more liberal than Obama and more conservative than” Republicans. With his apparent commitment to running in 2016, it seems Gary Johnson plans to take the liberty movement and use it to turn the establishment upside down. Here’s to hoping he can do just that!

Avoiding Somali pirates

Filed under: Africa, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:21

Strategy Page sums up the advice being provided to crews of merchant ships passing the Somali coast:

A decade of dealing with the Somali pirates has motivated merchant ships to adopt policies that make life very difficult for the pirates. To aid this process the NATO anti-piracy patrol emails advice to ships entering areas where pirates are active. The advice is based on experience with what works best to avoid getting captured by the pirates. If a vessel is captured, it costs the shipping companies (that own the vessel) millions of dollars, and it means the crew spends months (even a year or more) held captive on their own ship, often in squalid conditions. There is also the risk of injury, sickness or death, not to mention beatings and lack of medical care. So the crews have plenty of incentive to follow the advice.

The first item of advice is to keep a sharp lookout all the time. Radar will often reveal the larger mother ships, but the smaller speedboats carrying the pirate boarding party can only been seen by lookouts. If possible, supply these men with night-vision equipment. The pirates like to attack at night.

Stay away from unidentified ships, especially the small wooden cargo ships and ocean going fishing ships the pirates like to seize and use as mother ships. The pirates will not be able to deceive a determined identification attempt and the email advice gives plenty of tips on how to tell who is a pirate. If you identify a nearby ship as one seized by pirates, radio the anti-piracy patrol to check it out. Many mother ships are put out of action that way.

Avoid stopping at night, as this makes you a perfect target for pirate attack. When stopped at night use only the minimum number of navigation lights and otherwise keep the ship as dark as possible. If you must stop (usually outside a port) make sure the lookouts are alert and keep crew ready to quickly start the engines. Large ships can outrun and out maneuver pirates in their speed boats, but only if the larger ship is moving.

The anti-piracy patrol has also issued a list of things to look for when you see small wooden cargo ships and ocean going fishing ships and want to know if they have been taken over by pirates. The list describes the many telltale signs that these small ships have been turned into mother ships (and this reportable to the anti-piracy patrol).

November 17, 2012

“3D printing will be bigger than the web”

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:46

While I’m not quite willing to go as far as Chris Anderson (quoted above), I do think 3D printing is going to be a fantastic development in our very-near future:

Chris Anderson has exited one of the top jobs in publishing — Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine — to pursue the life of an entrepreneur, making a big bet that 3D printers represent a massive new phase of the industrial revolution.

He spoke at a Wired “Culturazzi” event, at the Marriott Union Square and to sign copies of his latest book: Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.

Mr Anderson is always an excellent speaker and his talk covered the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, which he picked out as the invention of the Spinning Jenny in 1764 — a hand powered machine for spinning yarn.

I’d have pinned the start of the Industrial Revolution to the invention of the steam engine and its ability to power large numbers of machines thus enabling the first factories — which represented aggregated labor energy. Scale makes factories viable.

But I can see why Mr Anderson would favor the Spinning Jenny as it was a high-tech machine that was kept in a home — just as 3D printers are home based, completing a neat cycle of history.

Reason.tv: Lance Armstrong Cheated to Win. Is that Wrong?

Filed under: Health, Media, Science, Sports — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:35

After months of bad press, the greatest competitive cyclist of all time has officially hit rock bottom: The Lance Armstrong Foundation has dropped the name of its eponymous creator and will now be known as the Livestrong Foundation.

Rest easy, Lance, it can’t get much — or is that any? — worse.

He may be a sanctimonious jerk whose doping denials are less convincing than a Lindsay Lohan rehab stint, but should he be pilloried for doing what all top cyclists — and increasingly, all of us — are doing: pursuing better living through chemistry?

Reason TV correspondent Kennedy defends performance-enhancing drugs from steroids to Viagra to that special memory pill we can’t remember the name of…

Steve Landsburg says paying off the national debt would be a bad idea

Filed under: Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Here’s an interesting argument:

How high should taxes be? High enough to cover expected outlays going forward — but no higher.

That’s because any additional revenue would be used to pay down the federal debt, which is a bad idea. It was almost surely a mistake to run up this much debt in the first place, but now that we’ve got it, the best thing to do is to keep it forever.

Here’s why:

Every $100 in outstanding debt commits the government to making payments with a present value of $100, and hence to collecting tax revenues with a present value of $100. In a world where the interest rate is 3%, the options include collecting (and paying off) $100 immediately, or $50 this year and $51.50 next year, or $11.38 a year for ten years running, or $3 a year forever. Because deadweight loss (i.e. the economic damage due to the disincentive effects of taxes) is roughly proportional to the square of the tax rate, it turns out that the latter — the policy of paying interest forever without ever making a principal payment — is (at least roughly) the policy that minimizes the present value of deadweight loss.

A new low in patents?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Apple has patented the “page turn”:

If you want to know just how broken the patent system is, just look at patent D670,713, filed by Apple and approved this week by the United States Patent Office.

This design patent, titled, “Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface,” gives Apple the exclusive rights to the page turn in an e-reader application.

Yes, that’s right. Apple now owns the page turn. You know, as when you turn a page with your hand. An “interface” that has been around for hundreds of years in physical form. I swear I’ve seen similar animation in Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons.

(This is where readers are probably checking the URL of this article to make sure it’s The New York Times and not The Onion.)

The argument for a guaranteed annual income program

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

In the National Post, Andrew Coyne lays out the benefits of instituting a GAI to replace existing poverty programs:

The basic idea behind the GAI is sound: to consolidate a number of federal and provincial programs, some in cash and some in kind, into a single, universal, unconditional cash benefit, delivered through the tax system. The base amount would be modest: perhaps $10,000-$12,000 per person. Critically, it would be taxed back only gradually, say at 25 cents on the dollar, as earned income rises. Compare that to current practice, where benefits are often withdrawn dollar-for-dollar, or in the case of benefits in kind like free dental care or prescription drugs, are denied altogether to those who leave social assistance: an effective marginal tax rate of 100% or more.

You can see why the people who design and administer these systems do this. They’re trying to save money; they want to target assistance only to those who “need” it; they worry what people would do if given the cash to buy what they want, rather than the services government thinks they should have. But the result of all this careful selection and monitoring is not just condescending and intrusive: it effectively punishes people for taking a job, or working longer hours. This is the key insight of the GAI: dependence is created not so much by giving people money when they don’t work — certainly not at $10,000 a year — as by taking it away from them when they do.

So if all of this makes sense, why hasn’t it been done? One barrier is cost. The more gradually you reduce the transfer as income rises, the more paltry the base amount must be to stay within a given limit; conversely, set a more generous minimum, and you have to impose a steeper clawback. Of course, the arithmetic becomes less stark if you include the revenues saved from the programs the GAI would replace. But here you run into other obstacles.

November 16, 2012

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:26

My usual Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week is all about the upcoming Lost Shores event, plus all the usual blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction.

Reason.tv: Ladies, We’re Screwed: Why Obama’s Re-election is Bad for Choice

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

Obama’s re-election is great for moms, right? Aren’t we just a bunch of mindless free spenders, so in love with humanity we want to support every cause and child as though they were each our own? Oh, hells no.

From jobs to health care to education, let’s face it ladies, we’re screwed…and not in the much needed 50 Shades of Grey way.

This election all boils down to choice. Because ours are now sadly limited. To make a simplistic sexist argument, how would you like it if you waltzed into the shoe department at Nordstrom’s or Bloomingdale’s and instead of ankle booties and wedges you found one or two styles of sensible, comfortable clogs? To borrow a term from Joe Biden, malarkey!

With the employer mandate, small businesses are now compelled by law to provide health care for their full-time employees. What will this do? Will it bolster families and working moms by offering free medical care to those in need? Hardly!

SEC employee stress levels must be down because they’re not surfing for porn during “98% of the workday”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Ah, the hard life of the SEC employee must have gotten a bit less stressful recently. Tim Cushing has the, um, sordid details:

An internal investigative report of the SEC’s Trading and Markets division has been recently been reviewed by Reuters. After reading its rundown of the misdeeds and abuses uncovered, I’m left with the urge to laugh maniacally in the manner of someone having just cleared the tipping point and now sliding irretrievably into insanity. The sheer irresponsibility on display here springs from the sort of irredeemable carelessness that comes with spending other people’s money (taxes) and operating without any credible oversight or accountability (a large percentage of government entities).

Bess Levin at Dealbreaker points out that while the SEC’s internal investigation may have turned up several misdeeds, ranging from the merely stupid to the positively horrendous, it is quite a step up from the insatiable pornhounds that used to populate the Commission:

    If you had asked us two years or two months or two days ago if we thought that there would be a time in the near future when Securities and Exchange employees would not be regularly reprimanded for watching porn on their work-issued computers for 98 percent of the workday, we would have said absolutely not. No judgment, but in our professional opinion, people do not go from, among other things:

    * Receiving “over 16,000 access denials for Internet websites classified by the Commission’s Internet filter as either “Sex” or “Pornography” in a one-month period”

    * Accessing “Internet pornography and downloading pornographic images to his SEC computer during work hours so frequently that, on some days, he spent eight hours accessing Internet pornography…downloading so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office.”

    …to living a porn-free existence at l’office.

Truly a mind-boggling set of employees. One regional staff accountant ran into the “no-porn” wall 1,800 times in a two week period, yet remained undeterred. Those caught accessing porn with ridiculous frequency cited the “stress” of their jobs as the underlying reason for the nearly uninterrupted pornathons.

Waiting for the Feds to respond to legal marijuana in Colorado and Washington

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

Phillip Smith examines the changed situation in Colorado and Washington in the wake of the marijuana legalization votes and what the federal government may do:

While the legal possession — and in the case of Colorado, cultivation — provisions of the respective initiatives will go into effect in a matter of weeks (December 6 in Washington and no later than January 5 in Colorado), officials in both states have about a year to come up with regulations for commercial cultivation, processing, and distribution. That means the federal government also has some time to craft its response, and it sounds like it’s going to need it.

So far, the federal response has been muted. The White House has not commented, the Office of National Drug Control Policy has not commented, and the Department of Justice has limited its comments to observing that it will continue to enforce the federal Controlled Substances Act.

“My understanding is that Justice was completely taken aback by this and by the wide margin of passage,” said Eric Sterling, former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee and currently the executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. “They believed this would be a repeat of 2010, and they are really kind of astonished because they understand that this is a big thing politically and a complicated problem legally. People are writing memos, thinking about the relationship between federal and state law, doctrines of preemption, and what might be permitted under the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.”

What is clear is that marijuana remains illegal under federal law. In theory an army of DEA agents could swoop down on every joint-smoker in Washington or pot-grower in Colorado and haul them off to federal court and thence to federal prison. But that would require either a huge shift in Justice Department resources or a huge increase in federal marijuana enforcement funding, or both, and neither seems likely. More likely is selective, exemplary enforcement aimed at commercial operations, said one former White House anti-drug official.

Windsor’s new city slogan, courtesy of Stephen Colbert

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

American comedian Stephen Colbert just can’t seem to get off the back of Windsor, Ontario, and now he has dragged Winnipeg and the CBC into his attack routine.

If you could reply to Colbert’s comment, what would you say? Leave a comment below or on our Facebook Page (facebook.com/cbcmanitoba), and our Trending Now team will select the best comments to send back to Colbert!

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