Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2013

Stephen Harper’s chief of staff submits his resignation

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Maclean’s covers the morning’s breaking news from Ottawa:

The prime minister’s chief of staff announced his resignation early Sunday, saying he left his post in light of the controversy around his personal handling of Sen. Mike Duffy’s expense payments.

Nigel Wright stepped down after a phone conversation with Stephen Harper, signalling a recognition that he — and not Duffy’s improper expense claims — had become the story.

Ray Novak, who has been by Harper’s side since 2001, will be the prime minister’s new chief of staff. Novak is thought to represent stability and is well known by all the federal ministers.

The Prime Minister’s Office said earlier this week that Wright personally paid off $90,000 in inappropriately claimed housing expenses for Duffy, prompting critics to complain that the bailout violated ethics rules that prohibit senators from accepting gifts.

I’m surprised it took this long for Wright to resign … I’d expected him to fall on his sword the day after it was revealed that he’d paid Duffy’s expenses with a personal cheque.

Top Three Common Myths of Capitalism

Filed under: Business, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

Is being pro-business and pro-capitalism the same? Does capitalism generate an unfair distribution of income? Was capitalism responsible for the most recent financial crisis? Dr. Jeffrey Miron at Harvard answers these questions by exposing three common myths of capitalism.

Scottish government assigns state guardians to all children

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

The SNP has introduced brand new form of interference in the lives of Scottish families:

Under the “scary” legislation, known as Getting It Right For Every Child or GIRFEC, every child aged under 18 will have a ‘Named Person’ with the legal right to ensure they are raised in a government-approved manner.

It will also mean that sensitve personal details about every child — even down to the names of their pets — can be recorded, stored and shared on a central database.

Incredibly, GIRFEC has already been adopted by almost every local authority in Scotland and yet most people — including some MSPs — have no idea of the full extent of its Big Brother-style interference.

[. . .]

For children under five, the state guardian will usually be a health visitor, while for school-age children it will usually be the headteacher or deputy head.

They will have to record “routine information” about their charges, which is then stored in a vast database, and can raise concerns about a child’s wellbeing that could ultimately result in them being taken into care.

Marion Samson, headteacher at Westquarter Primary and Nursery in Falkirk, is a ‘Named Person’ who says her role is to “challenge” families who are not bringing up their children properly.

However, in response to her profile on the government’s Engage for Education blog, one teacher – giving her name as Sian Dawson — described GIRFEC as “quite a scary notion”.

She wrote: “Perhaps the Scottish Government would be far better tightening up the processes surrounding child protection for those who actually need help rather than not trusting the majority of families to do a good job.”

According to a Scottish Government training document seen by this newspaper, the specific aim of GIRFEC is to undermine parents and give the “community” a greater role in raising children.

IP lawyers whine about patents and 3D printing

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

Cory Doctorow appears to have been plagiarized by real life:

Two minor characters from my novel Makers have apparently come to life and written an article for 3D Printing Industry. These two people are patent lawyers for Finnegan IP law firm, Washington, DC, which I don’t recall making up, but this is definitely a pair of Doctorow villains (though, thankfully, I had the good sense not to give them any lines in the book — they’re far too cliched in their anodyne evil for anyone to really believe in).

These patent lawyers are upset because the evil Makers (capital-M and all!) are working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to examine bad 3D printing patents submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office. The problem is that 3D printing is 30 years old, so nearly all the stuff that people want to patent and lock up and charge rent on for the next 20 years has already been invented, and the pesky Makers are insisting on pointing out this inconvenient fact to the USPTO.

This breaks the established order, which is much to be preferred: the UPSTO should grant all the bullshit patents that companies apply for. The big companies can pay firms like Finnegan to file patents on every trivial, stale, ancient idea and then cross-license them to each other, but use them to block disruptive new entrants to the marketplace. The old system also has the desirable feature of arming patent trolls with the same kind of bullshit patents so that they can sue giant companies and disruptive startups alike, and Finnegan can be there to soak up the tens of millions of dollars in legal fees generated by all this activity.

Modern terminology update from Chris Kluwe

Filed under: Humour, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:35

Even though he’s moved on from the Vikings, I still follow Chris Kluwe’s twitter feed. Here’s today’s terminology lesson from @ChrisWarcraft:

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