Quotulatiousness

July 8, 2019

Ottawa defends intrusive impaired driving rules against Maxime Bernier’s criticism

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ali Taghva reports on the contretemps over federal impaired driving rules that PPC leader Maxime Bernier slagged on Twitter:

Earlier today the official Twitter account for the Department of Justice had to issue a clarification after Maxime Bernier, the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, called the organization out for posting a worrying public announcement in both English and French.

In their original announcement, the Justice Canada account clearly stated that you could be arrested if you were to enjoy a drink after driving. The statement seemed to include summer time drinking on your own patio, noting that “It’s summertime and the living is easy! Whether you’re sitting on a patio or having a backyard #BBQ, remember it’s against the #law to have a blood alcohol concentration over prohibited levels within two hours of driving.”

The clarification posted since then pointed to a section in the law that prohibits conviction for those who decide to drink after arriving home safely.

I’d laugh at the awkward tweets if the actual law and the potential repercussions weren’t so damn serious.

While Justice Canada has issued a clarification, their mistake only highlights the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems with the recent legal changes brought forward through the adoption of Bill C-46 and its cousin C-45.

Bench heights and planing technique | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Paul Sellers
Published on 11 Jan 2014

Do you need a low bench height to bear down on your work when planing? Or should a sharp plane pull itself to task? See what Paul Sellers thinks.

We posted this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8FLl…) video the day before this one but we had a comment saying that the same would not be possible with the board level. Hopefully this will show that that is not the case.

To find out more about Paul Sellers and the projects he is involved with go to http://paulsellers.com

Bitcoin and its successors lack one thing that Libra has

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne on cryptocurrencies:

Sign of the times: the convenience store in my block of mid-town Toronto has installed, in addition to the usual fare of milk, cigarettes and magazines, an ATM dispensing bitcoins. Customers insert their debit cards and buy bitcoin, which they can then use to … to …

To do what, exactly, that they could not do with regular money? Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency — there are now dozens of competitors — has always struck me as a solution in search of a problem. Its chief selling point, the anonymity made possible by its system of ultra-encrypted peer-to-peer transactions, unmediated by the banking system and beyond reach of the regulators, would seem of most appeal to two groups: crooks and cranks.

Oh, and a third: speculators. The price of cryptocurrencies has tended to fluctuate wildly — having fallen to a third of its peak against the U.S. dollar last year, Bitcoin has tripled in value so far in 2019. Cryptocurrencies are unlikely to achieve widespread use as mediums of exchange so long as they fail to fulfil one of money’s other primary functions, as stores of value.

The Wild West reputation the privately issued currencies have acquired — one of the most popular, Dogecoin, was invented by a 26-year-old Australian in 2013 as a joke — will be one of the early hurdles confronting Facebook’s recent entry into the field. The company hopes its 2.4 billion users will soon be buying goods and services from each other with Libra, as the proposed digital currency is called, wherever on earth either party may happen to be.

And yet Libra differs from Bitcoin and its ilk in several important ways. One, while it makes use of the same blockchain encryption technology as Bitcoin to ensure the security of payments, it is not based on the same anarchic premise.

In contrast to Bitcoin’s unsupervised, massively distributed, “permissionless” network, Libra will operate, at least initially, via Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp platforms, which are very much subject to its control. The company, and the others it has recruited as partners — names like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal — are likewise highly visible targets of regulatory oversight, and indeed have signalled they intend to work with national banking regulators.

Dicing an Onion by Chef Jean Pierre

Filed under: Food, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

ChefJeanPierre
Published on 5 Jan 2012

Do you struggle trying to dice an onion? Chef Jean Pierre shows you the easiest way to dice an onion without shedding a tear.

QotD: Orwell on capitalism versus socialism

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

No one can question the dirtiness of international politics from 1870 onwards: it does not follow that it would have been a good thing to allow the German army to rule Europe. It is just possible that some rather sordid transactions are going on behind the scenes now, and that current propaganda “against Nazism” (cf. “against Prussian militarism”) will look pretty thin in 1970, but Europe will certainly be a better place if Hitler and his followers are removed from it. Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.

Both of these writers are aware of this, more or less; but since they can show no practicable way of bringing it about the combined effect of their books is a depressing one.

George Orwell, “The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek / The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus”, Observer, 1944-04-09.

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