My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s content update is called Fractured, which involves major changes to the Fractals of the Mists “infinite” dungeon, plus there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
November 29, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
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“This bill isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a steep hill greased up with lard”
Brian Lilley is against a new bill that would provide the police with the power to demand that drivers submit to breath testing even when there’s no evidence that they’ve been drinking:
It’s the latest attempt to crack down hard on the ever-shrinking problem of drunk driving. The news release touting Bill C-556 states that, if passed, it would, “amend the Criminal Code to allow police officers to perform systematic random breathalyzer testing regardless of whether or not the driver shows signs of impairment.”
That means police don’t need a reason to give you a test.
They don’t need to see dilated pupils, smell booze on your breath or even have you admit you had a beer while watching the game.
The bill would give police a big increase in power and that’s not a step I want to take.
No one supports drunk driving, no one that I know anyway. And attempts to deal with the issue have largely been successful.
Statistics Canada is clear — drunk driving has been on the decrease for years now.
“The impaired driving rate generally declined from the mid-1980s to 2006, when it reached its lowest point in over 25 years, at 234 incidents per 100,000 population,” reads a report from the agency.
Back in the mid-80s there were roughly 600 incidents of impaired driving per 100,000 of population; in 2011 the Canadian average across all provinces and territories was 262 incidents per 100,000.
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The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees all Canadians are protected from unreasonable search and seizure.
This bill would shred that protection.
This bill isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a steep hill greased up with lard and those in favour of ever expanded police powers are just waiting for Parliament to step on it.
Canadians need to say no to drunk driving and they need to say no to this bill.
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Taxation on gambling would be a money loser
Tim Worstall explains why it would make no sense whatsoever to impose taxes on the winnings from betting:
The point about betting of all types, including this spread betting, is that the winnings of some people are, and must be, entirely offset by the losses of others. Yes, certainly, there are companies in the middle who organise things and they are taxed on their earnings and profits in the usual manner. But the winnings of some punters come from the losses of others.
It’s also a pretty standard part of the UK taxation system that if there is going to be tax charged on the income or profits of something then there will also be an equal allowance against losses on doing that same thing. For example, Gordon Brown changed the law on a company selling a subsidiary: no longer would corporation tax be changed on any profits from doing so. But so also a company could not claim a tax credit for a loss from doing so.
So, if we introduced a tax on betting winnings we would also need to have a system of credits or allowances for betting losses. And here’s the problem with that idea: betting is a less than zero sum game. The winnings of any person or group of people are obviously the losses of all other people betting. So tax charged would be equal to tax credits gained. But it’s worse than that as the bookies are also getting their slice in the middle. Meaning that total winnings are less than total losses. So our credits and allowances for losses would be higher than any revenue gained from the winners.
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We’re from the FDA, we’re here to help you
Nick Gillespie on the mindnumbingly awful exercise of FDA regulatory power in shutting down personal DNA testing company 23andMe:
Personal genetic tests are safe, innovative, and the future of medicine. So why is the most transparent administration ever shutting down a cheap and popular service? Because it can.
In its infinite wisdom, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has forbidden the personal genetic testing service 23andMe from soliciting new customers, claiming the company hasn’t proven the validity of its product.
The real reason? Because when it comes to learning about your own goddamn genes, the FDA doesn’t think you can handle the truth. That means the FDA is now officially worse than Oedipus’s parents, Dr. Zaius, and the god of Genesis combined, telling us that there are things that us mere mortals just shouldn’t be allowed to know.
23andMe allows you to get rudimentary information about your genetic makeup, including where your ancestors came from and DNA markers for over 240 different hereditary diseases and conditions (not all of them bad, by the way). Think of it as the H&M version of the haute couture genetic mark-up that Angelina Jolie had done prior to having the proactive mastectomy that she revealed this year.
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Peter Huber of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, has an important new book out called The Cure in the Code: How 20th Century Law is Undermining 21st Century Medicine. Huber writes that whatever sense current drug-approval procedures once might have had, their day is done. Not only does the incredible amount of time and money — 12 years and $350 million at a minimum — slow down innovation, it’s based on the clearly wrong idea that all humans are the same and will respond the same way to the same drugs.
Given what we already know about small but hugely important variations in individual body chemistry, the FDA’s whole mental map needs to be redrawn. “The search for one-dimensional, very simple correlations — one drug, one clinical effect in all patients — is horrendously obsolete,” Huber told me in a recent interview. And the FDA’s latest action needs to be understood in that context — it’s just one more way in which a government which now not only says we must buy insurance but plans whose contours are dictated by bureaucrats who arbitrarily decide what is best for all of us.
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Australian railway’s Chinese-made locomotives falsely certified as asbestos-free
A growing concern for companies that deal with Chinese businesses is when safety is compromised and (as in this case) required safety certifications are falsified:
Railway workers have been exposed to potentially hazardous asbestos after the deadly dust was found in locomotives brought in from China.
The breach of a 10-year ban on the import of products containing the carcinogenic fibre is not the first incident of its kind.
Unions are now demanding tougher policing of Chinese imports, describing the current asbestos-free certificates as a farce.
Last year freight carrier SCT imported 10 locomotives made by China Southern Rail (CSR) to tow iron ore bound for China to port.
To comply with the decade-old Australian ban on asbestos imports, they were certified asbestos-free. However, this was not the case.
National secretary of the Rail, Tram and Bus Union Bob Nanva says maintenance workers raised concerns about the dust.
“We had our maintenance workers repairing a number of diesel engines,” he said.
“They identified a lot of white dust among those engines and asked the question as to whether or not that dust was safe.”
The workers’ concerns were justified. White asbestos — or chrysotile — was found throughout the locomotives, in insulation around the exhaust and muffler system, around coolant pipes and in the brake exhaust section near the roof of the driver’s cabin.
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This is not the first time China has broken the Australian ban on asbestos.
Last year more than 25,000 Chinese-made Great Wall, Chery and Geely cars were recalled after asbestos was discovered in their engine gaskets and brakes.
In decades to come experts expect hundreds of thousands of Chinese casualties from asbestos.
A 1980s film by Szechuan University smuggled out from China shows the tragic story of China’s own Wittenoom — at Dayao, in the province of Yunnan — where asbestos exposures had led to the fatal cancer — mesothelioma.
Back in Australia, it was the same type of blue asbestos, from the Wittenoom mine, that lined Melbourne’s blue Harris trains, potentially poisoning passengers when the walls were broken.
So dangerous were the trains they were sealed in plastic and buried in quicksand at a quarry in Clayton.
Blue asbestos, which is more likely to cause the cancer mesothelioma, is now banned in both countries — but China is now the world’s largest user of white asbestos, which Perth’s asbestos expert Professor Bill Musk warns still causes cancer.
H/T to Craig Zeni for the link.
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