Quotulatiousness

February 15, 2013

A useful bit of perspective over Whinnygate

Filed under: Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:35

It’s reasonable to be concerned that your hamburger may once have raced in the Grand National, but worries about chemical contamination from the horse meat are almost certainly overblown. In fact, your health might be more at risk from the burger itself:

There is reasonable public outrage at possible criminal conspiracies to adulterate meat products with horsemeat, and additional concerns raised about the presence of the anti-inflammatory known as bute.

While not in any way questioning this concern about adulteration with a chemical compound, it is helpful to get a sense of magnitude. When bute was given as a human medicine, it was reported to be associated with a serious adverse reaction in 1 in 30,000 (over a whole course of treatment), but at a dose giving concentrations at least 4,000 times that arising from eating a diet of horse meat – see the excellent information from the Science Media Centre

So making all sorts of heroic assumptions about there being a linear-no-threshold response, we might very roughly assign a pro-rata risk of a serious event as 1 in 100,000,000 per burger.

No wonder many Canadians skip jury duty

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:18

I’ve only ever been summoned for jury duty once, and that was about 20 years ago (I was lucky to not be in the pool for the Homolka case, which was in the courts at that time). I showed up on Monday morning, sat around reading my book for a couple of hours, then was dismissed. Repeat on Tuesday and Wednesday, then we were told our services wouldn’t be needed for the rest of the week. I was lucky not to lose any pay for performing my “civic duty” thanks to my employer-of-the-time, but most people are not so fortunate:

Let’s talk about jury duty. That much-despised civic responsibility in which we are asked to play a role in one of the world’s best justice systems.

Being summoned is viewed by many as an unwelcome interruption of their daily lives and, often, a punishing financial burden. It is ignored by hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadian every year.

And why? Well, most suggest a mix of lost wages and low compensation plays a role in it. Not to mention the hassle of having to listen to people talk all day long. But is it really worth chasing and punishing those who refuse to serve? And if so, shouldn’t something be done to make serving less punishing?

How bad is the pay? Pretty bad indeed:

Those selected to serve on jury duty have no protection from lost wages, although their employer is legally mandated to give them time off. And the compensation they receive is minimal.

So how much do jurors get paid? It is not a lot.

In Nova Scotia, jurors receive $40 a day plus mileage. Ontario pays jurors $40 a day once they have served more than 10 days, and $100 for every day over 49.

Alberta provides $50 per day of service, as well as travel expenses and possibly accommodations. The Northwest Territories gratefully pays $80 per day.

Quebec jury members get a much more generous deal:

Quebec residents called to participate in jury selection receive the cost of public transit or mileage and parking costs. They can also receive more than $45 for meals and as much as $138 to cover overnight accommodations.

Those selected to be a juror receive $103 for every day of the hearing and deliberations. That amount increases to $160 on the 57th day of service.

There are bonuses for working into the night and for Sundays and holidays, childcare allowances and psychological therapy after the trial.

H/T to Bob Tarantino for the link.

A self-described hippie who loves capitalism. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Neil Young!

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

In sp!ked, Patrick Hayes reviews Neil Young’s new book, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream.

Neil Young, the man who penned wistful lyrics about silver spaceships flying and about sleeping with Pocahontas, is, he openly admits in his autobiography, ‘a material guy’. After completing a project, he would ‘buy a car or something to celebrate’. He lavishes praise on Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor Company. He gushes about the disruptive nature of new technologies. And he speaks romantically about developing business plans and navigating ‘the waters of venture capitalism’. When raving about being able to buy a green card to live in the US, Young even goes as far as to announce: ‘Capitalism rocks.’

In fact recently, he tells us, he has been dreaming more. Since his life-threatening brain aneurysm in 2005, when he decided to ditch his various narcotics, he dreams ‘every night, not like before, when I induced dreams in the waking hours to snatch them in their innocence and commit them to song and melody and words captured’.

While he has far from quit songwriting, kicking the drink and drugs has given Young a new sense of mission, something that makes him feel alive – in fact, a mission that makes him question whether he has ‘been asleep’ over the past 40 years. Young is currently ‘trying to rescue recorded sound so people can feel music again’. While a huge fan of the internet, Young has become increasingly infuriated that current methods of reproducing music digitally keep very little of the quality of the original. But he is never one to sit back and moan about how things were better in the days of vinyl. He has instead become obsessed with finding a solution.

And, with additional time due to a broken little toe, he also decided to tick another box by following in the footsteps of his father, famous Canadian author Scott Young, by writing a book. In this instance, an autobiography, with a second book tentatively titled Cars and Dogs planned, but ‘no matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction’. He comments on the ease of writing: ‘No wonder my dad did this… writing could be just the ticket to a more relaxed life with fewer pressures and more time to enjoy with my family and friends – and paddleboarding!’

February 14, 2013

Crony capitalists make pitch for industrial policy in defence purchases

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:02

Canada doesn’t really have a defence industry — certainly not in the sense of Britain, France, or the United States. We have some companies which happen to make products of use to the military (armoured vehicles, for example), but our government is not tightly tied to the fortunes of these companies in some sort of maple-flavoured Military-Industrial Complex. Some movers-and-shakers want to change that:

It goes without saying that the proposal to siphon funds to defence contractors is gussied up in industrial-policy jargon. For instance, we’re told how defence industries are “important sources of technological dynamism and innovation [and] leading-edge participants in global value chains.” (Who today isn’t part of a global value chain?) Also in keeping with current industrial-policy trendiness, the government is instructed to be strategically selective in KIC-starting the sector. “KIC,” you see, stands for “Key Industrial Capabilities,” which is what we’re told we should focus on.

But despite the alluring bells and whistles, the message to firms selling to the government is clear: Either pay up or forget about getting the contract. From now on, if the committee gets its way, how you plan to spread the industrial booty around the Canadian economy will weigh directly in the balance with how your product performs. The new fighter jet doesn’t accelerate quickly enough to elude missiles? Well, never mind that, it comes with a new plant in Mississauga. Shells pierce the new tank’s armour? Too bad. But the innovation spinoffs for Thunder Bay are just too good to pass up.

You might think that interpretation extreme. Surely safety for our soldiers and value-for-money for our taxpayers come first. But what else could be meant by the recommendation that bidders specify the industrial benefits they’re offering as part of their bid itself, rather than as an add-on after the performance characteristics of their product or service have won them the contract?

Suppose that instead of causing defence contracts to be inflated with offsets for Canadian industry, this committee consisting of a high-tech CEO, a former chief of staff at national defence, an IP specialist in a defence company, a retired general and Paul Martin’s one-time policy guru recommended levying a 5% tax on all government defence purchases and using the revenues thus generated to subsidize Canadian defence contractors?

I sent the original Globe and Mail URL to Jon saying, “The very last thing Canada should be attempting is to use government money to build a ‘defence industry’. Let the military buy what they need on the open market — regardless of country of origin — at market prices. The fetish to have a domestic defence industry is pure crony capitalism clothed in a “patriotic” fig leaf.”

The LCBO crowds out another private business

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

In the latest Ontario Wine Review, Michael Pinkus writes an obituary for Wine Access magazine and hurls “J’accuse!” at the Ontario government’s liquor monopoly for the murder:

Now there are some of you out there who will be asking how can the Ontario Liquor Monopoly put an Alberta-based magazine out of business — well it’s actually quite simple, if you’re willing to connect the dots: if you only have a certain amount of advertising dollars to spend in Canada how much are you going to allocate to the largest population in the country (Ontario); even more to the point, how much do you put into the Liquor Board willing to buy more product if you’ll spend more of your ad budget with them versus a magazine that might (or might not) increase your sales.

I have long advocated for the LCBO to cease publication of this magazine. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beauty of a publication — my wife fawns over the pictures every issue — but it’s a publication that competes against private enterprise, and the LCBO is after all an extension of the government — so what I, and many others have said is unfortunately true: the government in essence, taking thousands of dollars out of the hands of the companies that pay taxes, their own populace, and competing against them. Sure I hear many of you saying “finally my tax dollars hard at work”: but ask yourself this question: how would you like the government competing against your business?

People don’t see the problem with Food & Drink magazine because they aren’t in the publishing business and are not affected by its publication, but consider these numbers: in the Holiday 2011 issue of said magazine, an almost Sears catalogue sized edition, there were 308 pages total, 140 of those were advertising (not including product placement and promotions within editorial / advertorial which is no doubt paid for as well — and don’t forget the 6 hefty inserts included inside the plastic wrapper) … that’s money that was not spent with privately run magazines that could have, and most likely, would have. Here are some more numbers to boggle the mind. According to the Luxury Media Sales website a full page in F&D magazine is $20,588 (2012 rate) — that’s a lot of money the government of Ontario is taking from their tax paying private enterprise magazines (in a democratic, free market system — who would believe the government is competing against their own populace). Think about that kind of money funneling out of your business sector, your chosen profession or what you do for a living (it’s close to 3 million dollars – 140 x $20,588) … do you think you’d be making the kind of money you are now? Would you welcome that kind of competition? And before you crassly answer “sure, the government can’t do anything right” also put in the fact that they’re the biggest game in town and control what you sell. The nightmare scenario is the closing of your business due to unfair competition and lack of revenue (but it’s the government, so what can you do) — in the publishing game you just shuttered a magazine because of lack of revenue and unfair competition. If you’re RedPoint Media you close down Wine Access magazine.

So, in Clue fashion, who killed Wine Access? It was Colonel LCBO, in the wine cellar, with the government monopoly privilege.

Why raising the minimum wage won’t help the poor

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Microsoft Excel: the most dangerous software on Earth?

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

I’ve made this case in conversation several times — usually after having to forensically determine just why someone’s spreadsheet produced an unlikely answer — the greatest strength of spreadsheets is also their greatest weakness. Anyone who’s built a spreadsheet knows how easy it is to make a mistake, and how hard that mistake can be to detect after the fact. Spreadsheets are free-form: you can set up relationships on the fly, pull data from one place to plug into a different formula somewhere else. It’s literally empowering to gain that much control over your data without having to learn a full programming language.

But that flexibility and power comes at a cost: there’s no built-in error checking of your assumptions. Oh, it’ll alert you to practical problems like mis-matched data types or mechanical errors in your formula, but can’t tell you whether the operation you’re attempting makes sense. The program can’t read your mind and can’t sanity check your work.

Do a spreadsheet for your family budget and you’ll almost certainly make a minor error or two.

Make a set of inter-linked spreadsheets and you probably double the chances of error for each new spreadsheet in the set.

Make a set of inter-linked spreadsheets that require manual copy-and-paste updates and you exponentially increase the chances of error.

Then, make that manually updated set of spreadsheets have a real-world impact on vast amounts of money:

To give you and idea of how important this is here’s a great tale from James Kwak:

    The issue is described in the appendix to JPMorgan’s internal investigative task force’s report. To summarize: JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office needed a new value-at-risk (VaR) model for the synthetic credit portfolio (the one that blew up) and assigned a quantitative whiz (“a London-based quantitative expert, mathematician and model developer” who previously worked at a company that built analytical models) to create it. The new model “operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another.” The internal Model Review Group identified this problem as well as a few others, but approved the model, while saying that it should be automated and another significant flaw should be fixed.** After the London Whale trade blew up, the Model Review Group discovered that the model had not been automated and found several other errors. Most spectacularly,

    “After subtracting the old rate from the new rate, the spreadsheet divided by their sum instead of their average, as the modeler had intended. This error likely had the effect of muting volatility by a factor of two and of lowering the VaR . . .”

To translate that into the vernacular, the bank, JP Morgan, was running huge bets (tens of billions of dollars, what we might think of a golly gee gosh that’s a lot of money) in London. The way they were checking what they were doing was playing around in Excel. And not even in the Masters of the Universe style that we might hope, all integrated, automated and self-checking, but by cutting and pasting from one spreadsheet to another. And yes, they got one of the equations wrong as a result of which the bank lost several billion dollars (perhaps we might drop the gee here but it’s still golly gosh that’s a lot of money).

And it’s not just JP Morgan: every financial firm, every bank, every brokerage uses Excel (or another spreadsheet program). Multiply JP Morgan’s experiences by the number of companies to get a rough idea of how much is at risk from un-audited (possibly even un-audit-able) financial models running on spreadsheets.

“A triumph for our culture of self-pity, narcissism and whining entitlement”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In sp!ked, Neil Davenport explains why the legal victory against workfare in England isn’t actually a good thing even for people in that situation:

… the case is still seen as a major coup. Joanna Long, a member of campaigning group Boycott Workfare, captured the mood of Reilly’s supporters: ‘Today’s ruling is a victory for the people against a government which thought it could compel unemployed and sick people to work without pay, backed by a vicious regime of sanctions which made the poorest far poorer.’ Really? Only in this victim-centred age could doing a few shifts at Poundland be seriously compared to forced slavery.

What the ruling in favour of Reilly is not, however, is a victory for ‘the people’. Rather, it is a triumph for our culture of self-pity, narcissism and whining entitlement. The new ruling will further cushion and cosset young people, relieving them of any impositions or pressures. And it will bolster the infantile notion that young people must be protected from the demands of becoming economically independent or hard working. In the long run, this will do the development of young people far more damage than a few weeks working for benefits.

[. . .]

In this sense, today’s ruling will bolster the idea held by some young people that the world really does owe them a living. The Reilly ruling seems to acknowledge officially that young people should not be expected to meet society’s requirement to work in case it damages their vulnerable self-esteem. It suggests that self-pity and a sense of entitlement is now far more laudable than simply overcoming life’s challenges or learning how to grow up.

Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the court came to such a decision. For the past two decades, the state has been keen to show that adult autonomy is not something people should exercise too much. So while the ruling looks like a victory for people power-style leftism against a (mainly) Tory government, in truth it is a demand for the state to look after us. It is an acknowledgement that we should forgo individual sovereignty for a close relationship with the all-watching, all-checking and autonomy sapping state. Whereas genuine radicalism was always a demand for autonomy from state regulators, today’s radicals aspire to be more tightly bound to state institutions. Any excuse to bolster state legitimacy and authority over us, even at the expense of a Tory government, will always appeal to elite-minded, undemocratic judges. Reilly and her supporters demand to be treated like children. Is it any wonder that a paternalistic state will oblige?

February 13, 2013

Can we get versions of this for the Toronto Star and National Post?

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:49

The Guardian-style comment generator:

Guardian-style comment generator

Amity Shlaes on Coolidge

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:21

Ed Driscoll has an interview with author Amity Shlaes at PJMedia:

MR. DRISCOLL: How long after finishing The Forgotten Man did you start work on Coolidge, and how did you do your research?

MS. SHLAES: I think I started working on Coolidge while I was writing The Forgotten Man because I wrote one draft of Forgotten Man, this history in the 1930s. And then I thought well, this doesn’t work narratively because I didn’t describe what the change was from; where they started, what were their premises. Their premises were the premises of the ’20s and, you know, the ’20s premises were maybe smaller government is better, maybe still the pendulum of government action, reduce uncertainty in the policy environment so that a business can go forward. All these ideas were ideas from the ’20s, and whose ideas were they? Well, they were Calvin Coolidge’s and before Coolidge, Harding’s ideas. But mostly Coolidge’s, I think he’s the hero of the ’20s.

So I went back at the very last minute with Forgotten Man and put Coolidge in and he felt just right. I really liked him. And I thought well, we don’t — we don’t appreciate him much and what I learned in that short look for writing the new beginning to Forgotten Man made me want to go back and give him his own show.

MR. DRISCOLL: Coolidge is sadly remembered today by many people for only one quote and that’s “The business of America is business,” which is actually a bastardization of what Coolidge really said. Could you place that quote into context?

MS. SHLAES: Yes, that’s from a nice speech to newspaper people, actually. And he says the chief business of America is business, and he also says the chief ideal of Americans is idealism. So there’s a yoking together of two concepts, if you go back and read the whole speech, and it’s not fair to paint him as a only capitalism or capitalism to the exclusion of other areas. He’s not like Ayn Rand, for example, because he always tends to bring in the spiritual — other spheres in — and he doesn’t think only capitalism always prevails. He sees a balance. What he doesn’t like is when capitalism or business intrudes upon spiritual. And that’s very different from modern libertarianism.

So anyway it’s all there and that’s — he was extremely idealistic and extremely spiritual, some would say pious. Herbert Hoover called him a fundamentalist, and that was not a compliment coming from Herbert Hoover.

The imaginary trade-off between ecology and economics

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Matt Ridley on the improvements in the environment in the western world:

Extrapolate global average GDP per capita into the future and it shows a rapid rise to the end of this century, when the average person on the planet would have an income at least twice as high as the typical American has today. If this were to happen, an economist would likely say that it’s a good thing, while an ecologist would likely say that it’s a bad thing because growth means using more resources. Therein lies a gap to be bridged between the two disciplines.

The environmental movement has always based its message on pessimism. Population growth was unstoppable; oil was running out; pesticides were causing a cancer epidemic; deserts were expanding; rainforests were shrinking; acid rain was killing trees; sperm counts were falling; and species extinction was rampant. For the green movement, generally, good news is no news. Many environmentalists are embarrassed even to admit that some trends are going in the right direction.

[. . .]

Why are environmental trends mainly positive? In short, the gains are due to “land sparing,” in which technological innovation allows humans to produce more from less land, leaving more land for forests and wildlife. The list of land sparing technologies is long: Tractors, unlike mules and horses, do not need to feed on hay. Advances in fertilizers and irrigation, as well as better storage, transport, and pest control, help boost yields. New genetic varieties of crops and livestock allow people to get more from less. Chickens now grow three times as fast in they did in the 1950s. The yield boosts from genetically modified crops is now saving from the plow an area equivalent to 24 percent of Brazil’s arable land.

What is really making a positive dent in the environmental arena is the unintended effects of technology rather than nature reserves or exhortations to love nature. Policy analyst Indur Goklany calculated that if we tried to support today’s population using the methods of the 1950s, we would need to farm 82 percent of all land, instead of the 38 percent we do now. The economist Julian Simon once pointed out that with cheap light, an urban, multi-story hydroponic warehouse the size of Delaware could feed the world, leaving the rest for wilderness.

It is not just food. In fiber and fuel too, we replace natural sources with synthetic, reducing the ecological footprint. Construction uses less and lighter materials. Even CO2 emissions enrich crop yields.

US Cyber Command’s recruiting headache

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Strategy Page on the “who could possibly have seen this coming” problems that the new electronic warfare organization is having with staffing:

U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) has been operational for two years now, and it is encountering some serious problems in recruiting people qualified to deal with the enemy (skilled hackers attacking American networks for whatever reason). People in the software and Internet security business have been telling Cyber Command leaders that they will have to change the way they recruit if they want to get qualified people. That means hiring hackers who lived on the dark side (criminal hacking) at one point or another. Such recruits would not pass the screening usually given to potential government employees who would be handling, and protecting, classified information and critical Internet systems. Few government officials are willing to bend the rules, mainly because no one wants to be responsible for some rogue hacker who got hired without the usual screening. It’s safer to go by the book and use that for your defense when the inadequate recruiting effort leads to a major Cyber War disaster.

Cyber Command is headquartered in Fort Meade (outside Washington, DC), most of the manpower, and capabilities, come from the Cyber War operations the military services have already established. Within Cyber Command there are some smaller organizations that coordinate Cyber War activities among the services, as well as with other branches of the government and commercial organizations that are involved in network security. At the moment Cyber Command wants to expand its core staff from 900 to 4,900 in the next five years. Twenty percent of those new people will be civilians, including a number of software specialists sufficiently skilled to quickly recognize skillful intrusions into American networks and quickly develop countermeasures. That kind of talent is not only expensive, but those who possess often have work histories that don’t pass the normal screening. These are the personnel Cyber Command is having a difficult time recruiting.

The big problems are not only recruiting hackers (technical personnel who can deal with the bad-guy hackers out there) but also managing them. The problem is one of culture, and economics. The military is a strict hierarchy that does not, at least in peacetime, reward creativity. Troops with good technical skills can make more money, and get hassled less, in a similar civilian job. The military is aware of these problems, but it is slow going trying to fix them.

Debunking the “1970s had a higher standard of living than today” meme

Filed under: Economics, Food, Health, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Don Boudreaux produces an anecdotal list of things that refute the inane notion that America’s standard of living peaked in the 1970s:

What follows here is drawn from memory. Perhaps my memory is grossly distorted, but my report of it here is an undistorted reflection of that memory. Here’s some of what I recall, of relevance to this discussion, from middle-class America of the 1970s; I offer the 25 items on this list in no particular order, except as they come to me.

(1) Automobiles broke down much more frequently than they break down today, hence, leaving motorists stranded, sometimes for hours, more often than is the case today.

(2) Automobiles rusted faster and more thoroughly than they do today.

(3) Someone in his or her early 70s was widely regarded as being quite old.

(4) “Old” people back then were much more likely to wear dentures than are “old” people today.

(5) Frozen foods in supermarkets were gawdawful by the standards of today – in terms both of quality and of selection.

[. . .]

(21) Coffee sucked. (It was almost all made from robusta beans.) And the selection of teas was pretty much limited to whatever Lipton sold.

(22) A diagnosis of cancer was far more frightening than it is today. Any person so diagnosed was regarded as being as good as dead.

(23) Going to college was much more unusual than it is today.

(24) Contact lenses were much more expensive than they are today. I purchased insurance (!) on my first pair of soft contact lenses (which I bought in 1980) in order to protect myself against the financial consequences of losing or damaging the one pair that I bought. (Such lenses were bought one pair at a time.)

(25) The idea of widespread use of personal computers seemed like science fiction. I very clearly recall overhearing, in the Spring of 1980, one of my economics professors, Wayne Shell (who also taught computer science), telling someone that he believed that, within a few years, many American households will have a computer. I thought at the time that Dr. Shell’s prediction was fancifully far-fetched.

I could go on, listing at least another 50 such recollections. But instead I’ll end this post here.

The Jazz Sweatshop (or the Harvard University of Jazz)

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In the New York Review of Books, Christopher Carroll discusses the great Charles Mingus:

Mingus (1922-1979) would have turned ninety last year, and in celebration, Mosaic has released The Jazz Workshop Concerts: 1964-1965, a new box set with rare and previously unreleased performances by some of Mingus’s greatest ensembles. These concerts, recorded near the apex of Mingus’s career, are visceral and often unvarnished. At times, the music here can be forbidding — several tracks run beyond thirty minutes — and though it may not be as uniformly polished as some of his studio albums, at its best this set captures an element of shock and surprise that Mingus’s studio recordings sometimes don’t.

“Mingus music,” as he called it, was so complex and so much an extension of his own personality that it was largely played only by his own group, the Jazz Workshop. Turnover in the Workshop was high, partly because he couldn’t afford to pay his musicians very well, partly because the experience was so grueling (members called it the Jazz Sweatshop), and partly because so many of them, after sharpening their skills with Mingus, went on to lead their own bands (Gary Giddins once called it the Harvard University of Jazz).

Even with Mingus at the helm playing bass (and sometimes piano), Workshop performances often resembled practice sessions more than concerts. He did everything in his power to push his players beyond their limits: while a musician was soloing, he might double the tempo, cut it in half, or drop the accompaniment of the bass, drums, and piano entirely, all without warning. Often, players would buckle under the pressure and songs would grind to a halt, with Mingus screaming recriminations and heaping shame on everyone in sight. But sometimes his musicians would rise to the challenge, and it was the possibility of this transcendence that gave Jazz Workshop performances such an electrifying sense of expectation and adventure.

February 12, 2013

The Bluenose II in court

Filed under: Cancon, History, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:14

The descendents of the designer of the original Bluenose are in court to demand the “copyright, and the moral rights in the copyright work” of the vessel which probably should be called the “Bluenose III“:

The Bluenose sank to the bottom in 1946; the replica Bluenose II was built in 1963, and then rebuilt in recent years and launched from the Lunenburg wharf this past September amid much fanfare and, as the province’s accountants could tell you, serious cost overruns.

No matter. This was a gala affair. Only Joan Roué and her father, Lawrence J. Roué — grandson of William J. Roué — were not among the smiling guests and proceeded to file suit against the province, the boat designers and boat builders in October, alleging that despite “the province owning the vessel … Joan and Lawrence Roué allege that they are respectively entitled to the copyright, and the moral rights in the copyright work” associated with the latest incarnation of the famous schooner.

To which the province responded — and I am paraphrasing here — “are you people kidding me?” while contending in court filings that William J. Roué’s storied original design perhaps wasn’t all that original to begin with, and, even if it were a singular masterpiece, that he had already been paid for it decades ago.

I posted about the “new” Bluenose II last year, explaining why I think they should have incremented the number in the vessel’s official name:

Wooden sailing ships are subject to far more wear and tear than modern vessels: they’re like the old tale of the farmer’s axe (even though everything’s been replaced over time, it’s still the same axe). This means that heritage sailing ships need lots of careful maintenance throughout their lives, and major re-builds at long intervals. In the case of Nova Scotia’s iconic Bluenose II, however, it’s sometimes more than a “rebuild” […] So, just to sum up: she’s being built to a different design (even though outward appearance is much the same), using different materials. In what way can you call her the same ship? The point made in the article, that the masts and sails were some of the “originals” being re-used is odd: those are among the parts that need replacing more often. And the mahogany and walnut saved from the last boat are almost certainly decorative elements, not structural ones.

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