Quotulatiousness

June 3, 2011

For the federal government, $1B is a rounding error

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

Terence Corcoran glares balefully at what the federal government considers “deep cuts”:

We are destined for two days of political self-congratulation in Ottawa. Throne speech Friday. Budget Monday. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, will use these opportunities to heap praise on their even-keeled and prudent handling of the economy, their deft manoeuvring of federal finances through the global storm, and their unwavering determination to guide us through the many uncertainties that lie ahead.

What they will not talk about is how they are going to balance the federal budget on target. Even less likely are any signs of enthusiasm for what should be a Conservative priority: reducing government spending.

That project has been shuffled off to Tony Clement at Treasury Board, where he will chair a small Cabinet committee that will dither away for a year trying to find the fiscal equivalent of nickels and dimes in a piggy bank the size of the House of Commons. Their first year target is $1-billion in cuts in departmental budgets of $120-billion, a spending reduction of less than 1%.

This is not good enough, not even close. For future years, Mr. Clement’s team will be hunting for an additional $3-billion in annual savings aiming for a total reduction of $4-billion by 2014, or about 1.3% of Ottawa’s total expenses of $300-billion.

As anyone who has ever done a family budget, or worked through tough times on a corporate budget, a 1% cut is a piece of cake, not much more than a rounding error.

June 2, 2011

Man succeeds in suicide attempt over an hour, as police and fire rescue watch

Filed under: Bureaucracy, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

A hard-to-believe story from Alameda, California:

Fire crews and police could only watch after a man waded into San Francisco Bay, stood up to his neck and waited. They wanted to do something, but a policy tied to earlier budget cuts strictly forbade them from trying to save the 50-year-old, officials said.

A witness finally pulled the apparently suicidal man’s lifeless body from the 54-degree water.

The San Jose Mercury News reported that the man, later identified as Raymond Zack, spent nearly an hour in the water before he drowned.

Perhaps they assumed that the suicidal man would get too cold and come back to shore, but it’s hard to understand how they could stand around for an hour and not do anything.

June 1, 2011

New report from the Obviousness Bureau: TEPCO underestimated earthquake/tsunami risks

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Japan, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Hands up, anyone who didn’t see this coming? Okay, put your hands down board members of TEPCO:

Japan underestimated the risk of a tsunami hitting a nuclear power plant, the UN nuclear energy agency has said.

However, the response to the nuclear crisis that followed the 11 March quake and tsunami was “exemplary”, it said.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which was badly damaged by the tsunami, is still leaking radiation.

Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan is facing a no-confidence vote submitted by three opposition parties over his handling of the crisis.

They say he lacks the ability to lead rebuilding efforts and to end the crisis at the Fukushima plant, public broadcaster NHK reported.

Some politicians from Mr Kan’s governing Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), including former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, are backing the motion.

If it is passed in a vote expected on Thursday, Mr Kan would be forced to resign or call a snap election.

However, given the thousands of dead and missing from the earthquake and tsunami, the attention paid to Fukushima has been rather disproportional. As someone joked yesterday, radiation from Fukushima has killed fewer people (none) than e.coli tainted food in Germany (16 at last report).

Update: In case I’m being too obscure, the “this” I refer to in the initial paragraph is the with-the-benefit-of-hindsight conclusion that the Fukushima plant was inadequately prepared for the earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

Similarities between US public schools and prisons

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

As kids, we always used to grumble about school and it being “like a prison”. Kids today probably say the same thing, but with rather more reason:

In the United States today, our public schools are not very good at educating our students, but they sure are great training grounds for learning how to live in a Big Brother police state control grid. Sadly, life in many U.S. public schools is now essentially equivalent to life in U.S. prisons. Most parents don’t realize this, but our students have very few rights when they are in school. Our public school students are being watched, tracked, recorded, searched and controlled like never before. Back when I was in high school, it was unheard of for a police officer to come to school, but today our public school students are being handcuffed and arrested in staggering numbers. When I was young we would joke that going to school was like going to prison, but today that is actually true.

The following are 18 signs that life in our public schools is now very similar to life in our prisons….

#1 Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has announced that school officials can search the cell phones and laptops of public school students if there are “reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search will turn up evidence that the student has violated or is violating either the law or the rules of the school.”

#2 It came out in court that one school district in Pennsylvania secretly recorded more than 66,000 images of students using webcams that were embedded in school-issued laptops that the students were using at home.

#3 If you can believe it, a “certified TSA official” was recently brought in to oversee student searches at the Santa Fe High School prom.

May 30, 2011

Licensing Salem’s witches

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

Katie Zezima reports on the surge of witches looking to be licensed in Salem, Massachusetts, after the city council made it easier to get a license:

“It’s like little ants running all over the place, trying to get a buck,” grumbled Ms. Szafranski, 75, who quit her job as an accountant in 1991 to open Angelica of the Angels, a store that sells angel figurines and crystals and provides psychic readings. She says she has lost business since the licensing change.

“Many of them are not trained,” she said of her rivals. “They don’t understand that when you do a reading you hold a person’s life in your hands.”

[. . .]

But not everyone is sure that quantity can ensure quality. Lorelei Stathopoulos, formerly an exotic dancer known as Toppsey Curvey, has been doing psychic readings at her store, Crow Haven Corner, for 15 years. She thinks psychics should have years of experience to practice here.

“I want Salem to keep its wonderful quaint reputation,” said Ms. Stathopoulos, who was wearing a black tank top that read “Sexy witch.” “And with that you have to have wonderful people working.”

Under the 2007 regulations, psychics must have lived in the city for at least a year to obtain an individual license, and businesses must be open for at least a year to hire five psychics. License applicants are also subject to criminal background checks.

May 29, 2011

QotD: The Yale fraternity prank and the feminist response

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

That wise precept, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” has obviously long disappeared among the sisterhood, however. So, too, has the idea of keeping things in perspective. The DKE brothers’ tasteless pledge prank was just that: a tasteless pledge prank. What is the most provocative thing you could say on a college campus today, the thing most likely to outrage the largest and most influential power bloc? “No means yes.” To inflate this incident into a symbol of anything beyond an unfunny effort at transgression on the part of a trivially small (and marginalized) number of individuals requires a willful blindness to the reality of Yale. (The administration doesn’t even recognize fraternities.) The university constantly sends the message that “no means no,” whether through such formal bodies as its Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, its Sexual Harassment Grievance Board, and a 24-hour sexual-assault hotline or through informal channels such as freshman orientation and public pronouncements. Yale president Rick Levin and Yale College dean Mary Miller condemned what they called the pledges’ “appalling language.” “We will confront hateful speech,” they stated in a press release, “in no uncertain terms: No member of our community should engage in such demeaning behavior.” Last week, Yale banned DKE from conducting any activities on campus, including use of campus e-mail, for five years on the ground that it had engaged in “harassment, coercion or intimidation.” Yale also announced that individual frat members had been disciplined for their speech. If the pledge chant represented official thinking on campus, or was in any way sanctioned by the authorities, obviously there would be cause for concern. Clearly, that is not the case.

To the civil rights complainants, however, the DKE incident and Yale’s allegedly inadequate response to it “precludes women from having the same equal opportunity to the Yale education as their male counterparts,” in the words of signatory Hannah Zeavin. (The signatories also want to gut further Yale’s already ludicrously inadequate due-process protections for those accused of sexual assault or harassment.) Yale has one of the greatest library systems in the world; it showers on students top-notch instruction in almost every intellectual discipline; it lavishes students with healthy food, luxurious athletic facilities, and rich venues for artistic expression. All of these educational resources are available on a scrupulously equal basis to both sexes. But according to the Yale 16 and their supporters, female students simply cannot take full advantage of the peerless collection of early twentieth-century German periodicals at Sterling Library, say, or the DNA sequencing labs on Science Hill, because a few frat boys acted tastelessly. Thus the need to go crying to the feds to protect you from the big, bad Yale patriarchy. Time to bring on the smelling salts and the society doctors peddling cures for vapors and neurasthenia.

Heather Mac Donald, “Sisterhood and the SEALs: How can women join special forces when they can’t even handle frat-boy pranks?”, City Journal, 2011-05-26

More on the Anglo-Danish Marmite affair

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Colby Cosh rounds up the details on the Marmite affair:

Nothing stirs the blood of the British like a nice slapfight over European regulation, and this goes double when food is involved. The UK press has found its latest excuse for tut-tutting and finger-waggling in the unlikeliest of places: at the bottom of the squat, distinctive little jar in which the vile breakfast spread Marmite is sold. This week, English-language journals in Denmark reported that the Scandinavian kingdom’s food regulator was having the dark brown yeast extract cleared from the shelves of shops which serve Brit expatriates.

The British reared up as one, displaying a spirit of indignant unity. “What have the Danes ever done for global cuisine?” thundered the Belfast Telegraph, breaking Godwin’s Law into splinters over its knurled Ultonian knee. (Unfortunately, a good answer might be “Not given it Marmite, at any rate.”) Fans of the quasi-foodstuff gathered on Facebook to form a “Marmite army”. Social campaigners used the ban to call attention to dubious patches in Denmark’s record on human rights and environmentalism.

As he points out, nobody at the Danish food nanny office suddenly issued a ban: technically Marmite had never been cleared for import at all. So it’s just a matter of filling in a form or two and Bob’s your uncle? Not quite:

Marmite’s status as a “fortified food” has apparently only just been noticed, and the DVFA says that “it has not received an application for marketing in Denmark of Marmite or similar products with added vitamins or minerals.” A glance at the DVFA’s procedure for obtaining approval to market these foods reveals why brand owner Unilever might not be in such a hurry to file. (And it also reveals that free-trade fanatics like me should probably rein in their admiration for the EU’s trade barriers just a little.) The agency not only requires compliance with EU-wide regulations, but insists that each product pass an “individual risk assessment” performed using a made-in-Denmark scientific procedure.

May 26, 2011

Reason.tv: The government’s war on cameras

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:09

The Danish Marmite affair thickens

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

Lester Haines has the latest on the plight of ex-pat Brits suffering under a dictatorial food regime in Denmark:

According to this official statement, neither Marmite nor its Oz rival Vegemite are banned in Denmark, because they’ve never actually been approved for sale.

A 2004 law controls the distribution of products with “added vitamins, minerals or other substances”, and in order to punt such foodstuffs, they “need to be approved by the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration before the product can be marketed”.

[. . .]

In effect, then, those shops selling Marmite are dealing in unauthorised enhanced substances.

We and the Daily Mail have no doubt that any attempt to legalise Marmite would be met with a swift rejection, in defiance of EU directives on free trade. As Copenhagen-based expat Lyndsay Jensen put it: “They don’t like it because it’s foreign. But if they want to take my Marmite off me, they’ll have to wrench it from my cold dead hands.”

It’s been said that Marmite is an “acquired taste”, but Denmark’s health regulators are moving quickly to ensure that Danes never have the opportunity to develop that taste. Of course, like most other forms of prohibition, it might actually increase the attractiveness of the “forbidden fruit”.

Denmark has a long coastline, so smuggling in the little black jars across the North Sea would be quite possible . . .

May 25, 2011

Australia: leading the charge to our over-Nannied future

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

There once was a time when the popular image of Australia celebrated its rugged, independent, free-spirited approach to life. It’s hard to recognize that in today’s Nanny State paradise:

Last week, the Preventative Health Taskforce published a report which, in its words, launched a ‘crackdown’ on drinking, smoking and the eating of ‘energy-dense, nutrient-poor’ food. This report made 122 recommendations, called for 26 new laws and proposed establishing seven new agencies to change the behaviour of Australians. To take just a few examples related to tobacco, the Taskforce called for the price of 30 cigarettes to rise to ‘at least $20’ (£13) by 2013, for a ban on duty-free sales, a ban on vending machines and a ban on smoking in a host of places including multi-unit apartments, private vehicles and ‘outdoors where people gather or move in close proximity’. They even contemplate a ban on filters and the prohibition of additives that enhance the palatability of cigarettes.

As in so many countries, Australia’s anti-smoking campaign has acted as a Trojan horse in the effort to fundamentally change the relationship between citizen and state. By no means does it end with tobacco. The Taskforce also wants to ban drinks advertising during programmes that are watched by people under 25 — a category so broad as to include virtually every programme — and calls for graphic warnings similar to those now found on cigarette packs to be put on bottles of beer. It also wants the government to establish ‘appropriate portion sizes’ for meals, to tax food that is deemed unhealthy and to hand out cash bonuses to those who meet the state’s criteria of a healthy lifestyle.

And it’s not just the booze and ciggies getting the full Nanny treatment, either. Australia is very concerned about the internet browsing and video game habits of the citizens:

It is the professed concern for the well-being of children that props up so much authoritarian legislation in both hemispheres. This does not just apply to smoking, nor even health issues in general. Australia has a unenviable record of internet censorship, for example, and a national website filter has been proposed to protect children from pornography and gambling. It also has a longer list of banned video games than any other Western democracy. And so if you, as an Australian adult, want to exercise your right to gamble and play violent video games, that’s just too bad. The rights of some hypothetical teenager to enjoy freedom from grown-up pursuits trump your own rights to pursue them.

Denmark moves to save its citizens from Marmite

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:22

Danish diners will no longer be subject to the horrors of Marmite, thanks to swift and decisive action by the country’s Veterinary and Food Administration:

According to the advert, you either love it or hate it. As far as Marmite goes, the Danish government hates the stuff. That at least is the conclusion that many foreigners have drawn following a ban on the sticky brown yeast extract.

The sales ban enforces a law restricting products fortified with added vitamins. Food giant Kellogg’s withdrew some brands of breakfast cereal from Denmark when the legislation passed in 2004, but until now Marmite had escaped the attention of Danish authorities.

“What am I supposed to put on my toast now?” asked British advertising executive Colin Smith, who has lived in the country for six years. “I still have a bit left in the cupboard, but it’s not going to last long.”

I celebrated the decision by having some Marmite on crackers for lunch yesterday. More for me!

Update: “Let the rise of the Marmite Army begin!”:

“Spread the word, but most importantly spread the Marmite,” wrote Kelly. “On every street in good old Denmark, show ’em what they’re missing after they’ve banned this iconic product from our supermarket shelves! Make it a Marmite day everyday folks! Let the rise of the Marmite army begin!”

But even on the page, opinion remained divided. A perplexed Ray Weaver wrote: “but… it’s horrible…”

On the page calling for a boycott of Danish goods, fan Joe Figg feared the ban could have far-reaching consequences. “This dastardly move could bring about global warming of toast,” he wrote. While Mark Salisbury wrote: “Down with spread fascism!”

May 16, 2011

Christian holidays? Down the EU memory hole!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:34

It could hardly be an oversight that the EU “forgot” to include any traditional Christian holidays in their run of 3 million school diaries produced for students:

A year ago the European Commission (EC) printed more than three million school diaries for distribution to students. They are lovely diaries which, true to the EU’s multicultural ethos, helpfully note all the Sikh, Hindu, Muslim and Chinese festivals. The diary also highlights Europe Day, which falls on 9 May. But the diary is not without some very big gaps. For example, it makes no reference to Christmas — or Easter or indeed to any Christian holidays.

However, the importance of 25 December is not entirely ignored. At the bottom of the page for that day, schoolchildren are enlightened with the platitude: ‘A true friend is someone who shares your concern and doubles your joy.’

Not surprisingly, many Europeans are not exactly delighted by the conspicuous absence of Christian festivals from a diary produced for children. In January, an Irish priest complained to the ombudsman of the EC and demanded an apology for the omission of Christian holidays and the recall of the diaries. A month later, the commission apologised for its ‘regrettable’ blunder. However, the ombudsman dismissed the demand to recall the diaries, arguing that a one-page correction sent to schools had rectified the error.

I suspect, had the complaint been from a religious leader in a non-Christian faith, they’d not have let a month elapse before springing to address the error in that faith’s holy days . . .

May 4, 2011

Alleged forged signatures on NDP nomination papers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:29

This is weird. It may just be a function of how little experience the campaign workers had in that riding — I know the NDP were a skeleton crew in Quebec for this election (which makes their huge haul of seats from the province even more amazing), but forging signatures? It just doesn’t add up at all. Why do I say that? Let me tell you a little story . . .

Oddly enough, I had a discussion with a Returning Officer (not the RO for my riding) a few weeks ago about nomination papers and the requirements for signatures. It was rather illuminating.

Every candidate for parliament has to submit nomination papers to the constituency’s Returning Officer within a set number of days after the writ has dropped. Many would-be candidates for smaller or less well-organized parties have to depend on going door-to-door to gather signatures, as they don’t have enough party members in the riding to meet the requirement internally. I’ve done this for Libertarian candidates, and I’m sure most of the NDP candidates in Quebec this time around had to do the same thing. (Signing the nomination paper does not mean you’re a supporter of that candidate, it merely acknowledges that you have been informed that they are hoping to run in the election.)

So, a few bare minutes before the deadline, each of the candidates has to drop off their nomination papers with all of the required signatures. Elections Canada is not a huge organization (by government standards, they’re tiny). They don’t have the resources to do an instant check of the nomination papers. What they do is to verify that each of the signatories on the list is a registered voter in the riding.

Even this low barrier can be a problem, so Elections Canada recommends that candidates provide more than the minimum 100 signatures, as some of them may not be acceptable. Once all the names have been checked, if there are still not at least 100 acceptable signatures, then the Elections Canada folks do another pass through the list, and accept signatures from people whose addresses had registered voters in the previous election (the hurdle gets even lower).

Did you notice that last little bit? If you live at an address which had one or more registered voters living there in the last election, you are deemed to be a registered voter for the purposes of signing nomination papers. Is that not a low enough hurdle to avoid the need to submit forged signatures?

Update: Here’s the Globe & Mail story.

Update the second, 6 May: Elections Canada has declared the nomination papers to be valid. The other candidates still have the opportunity to challenge the result in court, although there may not much hope for them to succeed.

April 24, 2011

No 21-gun salute for royal wedding due to “health and safety” concerns

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:41

Ah, those “elf’n’safety” goons strike again:

When Prince William and Kate Middleton leave Westminster Abbey on Friday, there will be no 21-gun salute to mark their union. Mandrake can disclose that plans for such an honour in Hyde Park were abandoned because of fears over “health and safety” and “noise pollution”.

One of the Prince’s pals tells me: “We thought it would be a fitting tribute for the wedding, but we were told that, because of health and safety, and noise pollution concerns, it would involve too much red tape to get a new salute authorised.”

Twenty-one gun salutes in Hyde Park and Green Park are a traditional military honour, carried out by the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, to mark important royal occasions including Coronation Day and the official birthdays of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s wedding in 1840 began with such a tribute.

April 22, 2011

DC business owner successfully fights photo tickets

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:17

Jon sent me this link, which shows that you sometimes can fight speed camera tickets:

Five times and counting before three different judges, the Prince George’s County business owner has used a computer and a calculation to cast reasonable doubt on the reliability of the soulless traffic enforcers.

After a judge threw out two of his tickets Wednesday, Mr. Foreman said he is confident he has exposed systemic inaccuracies in the systems that generate millions of dollars a year for town, city and county governments.

He wasn’t the only one to employ the defense Wednesday. Two other men were found not guilty of speeding offenses before a Hyattsville District judge during the same court session using the same technique.

“You’ve produced an elegant defense and I’m sufficiently doubtful,” Judge Mark T. O’Brien said to William Adams, after hearing evidence that his Subaru was traveling below the 35-mph limit – and not 50 mph as the ticket indicated.

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