Quotulatiousness

February 1, 2011

Now roiling the hoi-polloi: bit-by-bit billing

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:18

The internet is about to become a political topic . . . not the internet itself, but the prices Canadians will have to pay to get online:

Industry Minister Tony Clement says he is looking closely at the “usage-based billing” decision issued last week by the CRTC that has consumers, businesses and citizen groups’ decrying what they see as a price hike for Canadian Internet services that could clamp down on innovative technologies.

“I can assure that, as with any ruling, this decision will be studied carefully to ensure that competition, innovation and consumers were all fairly considered,” Mr. Clement said in a statement obtained by The Globe and Mail.

The decision will allow large Internet service providers (ISPs), such as Bell Canada and Rogers Communications, to charge smaller ISPs that lease space on their networks on a volume basis. Executives at smaller providers have already begun phasing out popular “unlimited” Internet packages because it has become economically unfeasible to continue offering them.

I wondered how long the current situation would last: Bell and Rogers used to tout their “unlimited” internet access, but if you read the fine print, it wasn’t really “unlimited”. Like any resource that is “free”, some will use far more of it. In the early days of broadband, that didn’t matter, as there were not enough users to consume all the bandwidth anyway. Now that there are many more subscribers, the heavier bandwidth users are causing problems.

In addition to the sheer number of broadband customers, another change that was not fully foreseen was the way those customers use their internet connections has changed. When Bell and Rogers got into this market, there were far fewer options for using the internet. You could visit websites all day long, read email, listen to cheesy renditions of popular music, and (for some) download pirated movies for hours on end.

Now that TV and movie viewers have better viewing options through their internet connections than they get over-the-air or through cable or satellite TV, the nature of internet traffic has been revolutionized, and not in a way that Bell and Rogers were anticipating.

Update: Michael Geist thinks I’ve been taken in by the big guys’ propaganda:

[. . .] arguments in support of UBB are frequently accompanied by the claim that the approach is like any other service — you pay for what you use. Yet Bell’s UBB plan approved by the CRTC does not function like this at all. Its plan features a 60 GB cap with an overage charge for the next 20 GB. After 80 GB, there is no further cap until the user hits 300 GB. In other words, using 80 GB and 300 GB costs the same thing. This suggests that the plan has nothing to do with pay-what-you-use but is rather designed to compete with similar cable ISP bandwidth caps. In fact, Primus has gone further, stating “It’s an economic disincentive for internet use. It’s not meant to recover costs. In fact these charges that Bell has levied are many, many, many times what it costs to actually deliver it.”

He also points out that the Canadian market is very tightly controlled by a oligopoly of key players:

While the CRTC’s UBB decision provides the immediate impetus for public concern, the reality is that the bandwidth cap issue in Canada is far bigger than just this decision. The large Canadian ISPs control 96% of the market, meaning the independent ISPs are tiny players in the market. Even if the CRTC denied Bell’s application for wholesale UBB, it would still only constitute a tiny segment of the overall Canadian Internet market.

As virtually every Canadian Internet user knows, the Canadian market is almost uniformly subject to bandwidth caps — the OECD reports that Canada stands virtually alone with near universal use of caps. The scale of the Canadian caps are particularly noteworthy — while Comcast in the U.S. imposes a 250 GB cap, Canadian ISPs offer a fraction of that number:

  • Videotron starts at 3 GB for Basic Internet, 40 GB for its next plan and tops at 200 GB for very fast speeds at $149/month
  • Rogers Lite service caps at 15 GB, it fastest service stops at 175 GB
  • Bell’s Essential Plus service offers a 2 GB per month cap, climbing to 75 GB for its fastest service

The caps are already having a consumer impact as Bell admits that about 10% of its subscribers exceed their monthly cap (a figure that is sure to increase over time). Moreover, the effect extends far beyond consumers paying more for Internet access. As many others have pointed out, there is a real negative effect on the Canadian digital economy, harming innovation and keeping new business models out of the country. Simply put, Canada is not competitive when compared to most other countries and the strict bandwidth caps make us less attractive for new businesses and stifle innovative services.

January 31, 2011

Showing their true colours?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

To mark the Egyptian government’s shutdown of cellphone and internet access to their angry citizenry, the US government wants to have the power to do the same. Subtle, eh?

Legislation granting the president internet-killing powers is to be re-introduced soon to a Senate committee, the proposal’s chief sponsor told Wired.com on Friday.

The resurgence of the so-called “kill switch” legislation came the same day Egyptians faced an internet blackout designed to counter massive demonstrations in that country.

The bill, which has bipartisan support, is being floated by Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The proposed legislation, which Collins said would not give the president the same power Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is exercising to quell dissent, sailed through the Homeland Security Committee in December but expired with the new Congress weeks later.

The bill is designed to protect against “significant” cyber threats before they cause damage, Collins said.

Got to admire the balls of brass required to introduce legislation to do something in America at exactly the same time the US government is demanding that Egypt restore their citizens’ internet access. Breathtaking hypocrisy.

Update: By way of American Digest, a most appropriate image:

January 29, 2011

Bad news for US small businesses

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:32

A very small item in the recent US Obamacare legislation will mean a huge increase in tax compliance paperwork:

Section 9006 of the health care bill — just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document — mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year.

[. . .]

But under the new rules, if a freelance designer buys a new iMac from the Apple Store, they’ll have to send Apple a 1099. A laundromat that buys soap each week from a local distributor will have to send the supplier a 1099 at the end of the year tallying up their purchases.

The bill makes two key changes to how 1099s are used. First, it expands their scope by using them to track payments not only for services but also for tangible goods. Plus, it requires that 1099s be issued not just to individuals, but also to corporations.

Taken together, the two seemingly small changes will require millions of additional forms to be sent out.

“It’s a pretty heavy administrative burden,” particularly for small businesses without large in-house accounting staffs, says Bill Rys, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Businesses.

Eliminating the goods exemption could launch an avalanche of paperwork, he says: “If you cater a lunch for other businesses every Wednesday, say, that’s a lot of information to keep track of throughout the year.”

For a one-person business, this change could double or triple the tax-related paperwork right there. Given that a lot of people have started new businesses in the last couple of years — partly because big businesses downsized and haven’t been hiring again — this will be a significant discouragement to self-employment.

H/T to Virginia Postrel for the link.

Update: It may not stand: there’s a bi-partisan coalition in the Senate to repeal that provision.

Inappropriate license plates, Virginia style

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:07

Jason Ciastko send a link to this article. You can see why the Virginia authorities decided to recall the license plate (but you’re probably wrong):

A Virginia motorist has apparently had to return their vanity license plate after the Department of Motor Vehicles decided it was too lewd for public roadways.

According to the user-generated news website Reddit, the DMV revoked a special-issue “Kids First” Virginia plate with the personalized license plate “EATTHE” to spell out the phrase, well, you know…

Full story, including the sad bureaucratic recall procedure, here.

Most reactions were like the one from a mom in a minivan plastered with pro-Christian bumper stickers who chased him down.

“I thought she was going to yell at me and tell me I’m going straight to hell, but she and her kids found it absolutely hilarious and she took pics of it with her kids next to the plate,” said Yeaman. “I learned my lesson on judging people before they speak.”

Sadly, the Virginia DMV didn’t talk to him before they judged him offensive and sent him a letter requesting the plates back immediately. With his brother’s encouragement, Yeaman requested a hearing with a mediator to keep the plates, which he didn’t find offensive.

H/T to Craig Zeni for the Jalopnik link.

January 27, 2011

New entrant into the “Security Theatre Kabuki Hall of Fame”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:54

Step forward, our first inductee for 2011, Gatwick Airport security staff:

Airport officials ordered a holidaymaker carrying a toy soldier onto a plane to remove its three-inch gun — because it was a safety threat.

Ken Lloyd was stunned when he was told he could not go on the plane with the nine-inch model soldier because it was carrying a ‘firearm’.

The Canadian tourist and his wife had bought the toy, which holds a replica SA80 rifle, during a visit to the Royal Signals Museum at Blandford Camp in Dorset.

Well caught, security super-heroes! Here’s the vicious piece of deadly weaponry they bravely prevented from being smuggled aboard the plane:

January 25, 2011

More examples of the poor being taxed to benefit the rich

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

Gregg Easterbrook isn’t a fan of flying cars — at least, not flying cars that are fuelled on pure government subsidy:

General Motors has emerged from bankruptcy and taken initial steps to repay its federal bailout money — two good bits of news, although the taxpayer remains on the hook for many billions of dollars extended to GM. Specialty electric-car maker Tesla Motors also had a successful initial public offering and is being celebrated as some kind of testament to the entrepreneurial spirit. For Tesla, this is pure PR.

Tesla is capitalized via a $465 million no-collateral federal loan. This means that if Tesla goes out of business, the taxpayer will take the loss, while if Tesla becomes a hit, its management and private investors will keep all the profit. The company bought a factory in Fremont, Calif. The Department of Labor made $19 million in special payments to workers there, federal taxpayers subsidizing the Tesla labor force. The firm’s electric cars entitle buyers to a $7,500 tax credit, plus sales tax exemption in many states, meaning Tesla marketing receives significant subsidies — average people are taxed so wealthy Tesla buyers receive extra discounts. Compared to its size, Tesla is more heavily subsidized than General Motors at the low point. Basically, the company’s existence is a giant raised middle finger to the taxpayer.

And what’s the product? A $109,000 luxury sports car that accelerates from zero to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds, the speed of the hottest Porsches. Such speed has no relevance to everyday driving; rather, it is useful solely for road-rage behavior such as running red lights and cutting others off. Taxes forcibly removed from the pockets of average people now fund a rich person’s plaything. I dread the moment President Barack Obama has his picture taken next to a Tesla, as if throwing the public’s money away on this toy for the Silicon Valley rich were an accomplishment.

The other absurd vehicle in development is the Terrafugia flying car, which just won exemption from a federal airworthiness safety standard. Surely you will feel secure when a flying car exempted from safety standards buzzes your neighborhood, especially when you learn that another federal waiver means the pilot needs only 20 hours of experience before he or she takes off. Maryland, my state, requires 60 hours behind the wheel before receiving a driver’s license. But fly after 20 hours? Hey, wheels up! Surely few of these accidents-looking-for-a-place-to-happen will sell on the free market. So — scan the horizon for a bailout. The Terrafugia company just got a piece of a $65 million military contract to research a flying Jeep-like thing; don’t hold your breath. If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, defense contracting is the last refuge of bad business plans.

Tesla note: The car is well-named, for although Nikola Tesla was an important inventor and a key figure in the development of commercial-scale alternating current (he had one of the basic ideas for getting electricity to homes), he also was a relentless self-promoter, not shy about exaggeration. The famous photo of him in his Colorado Springs laboratory, reading a book as electricity crackles around him, is a double exposure — that is, faked. Tesla’s plan to allow global wireless communication using Earth’s magnetic field was, let’s just say, a long shot — he worked, of course, before satellite-relayed signals were possible — and his claim to be able to deliver electricity to businesses through the air never made much sense. If Tesla were alive today, he’d drive a Tesla.

Terrafugia was last heard from lowering their expected capacity, while raising their prices back in September.

Did Ayn Rand experience “delivering oneself into gradual enslavement”?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:29

Patia Stephens investigates whether Ayn Rand and her husband ever took social security or medicare benefits:

Critics of Social Security and Medicare frequently invoke the words and ideals of author and philosopher Ayn Rand, one of the fiercest critics of federal insurance programs. But a little-known fact is that Ayn Rand herself collected Social Security. She may also have received Medicare benefits.

An interview recently surfaced that was conducted in 1998 by the Ayn Rand Institute with a social worker who says she helped Rand and her husband, Frank O’Connor, sign up for Social Security and Medicare in 1974.

[. . .]

According to a spokesman in the Baltimore headquarters of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Rand and O’Connor were eligible for both Part A, which provides hospital coverage, and Part B, medical. The spokesman said their eligibility for Part B means they did apply for Medicare; however, he said he was not authorized to release any documentation and referred the request to the CMS New York regional office. That office said they could not locate any records related to Rand and O’Connor.

January 21, 2011

Alfred Kahn, godfather of deregulation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

An obituary at The Economist for one of the key players in the deregulation of American business that was critical to solving the economic malaise of the 1970s:

WHEN everyone else at the airline counter for the flight from Hicksville to Washington was sighing, checking their watches and using their elbows on their neighbours, Alfred Kahn would be smiling. And later, cramped in his seat between some 20-stone wrestler and a passenger whose “sartorial, hirsute and ablutional state” all offended him, snacking from a tiny packet of peanuts that had cost him a dollar, he would sometimes allow the smile to spread under his Groucho Marx moustache into a big, wide, gloating grin.

For Mr Kahn had made this crowd and packed this aircraft. His deregulation of America’s airlines in the 1970s opened up the skies to the people, for better and worse. And though, being an economist, he could not help muttering about the imperfection of societies and systems and the absurdity of predictions—and though, being an inveterate puncturer of himself, he would demand a paternity test if anyone called him the father of the deregulated world—his adventures with airlines led on to the freeing of the trucking, telecoms and power industries, and heralded the Thatcherite and Reaganite revolutions.

When he took over the Civil Aeronautics Board for President Jimmy Carter in 1977 air travel was regulated to the hilt, with prices, routes and returns all fixed and aircraft, which could compete only on the number of flights and the meals they served, flying half-full. Mr Khan, furiously resisted by companies, pilots and unions, removed the rules. As an academic, author of “The Economics of Regulation” in two stout volumes, he was eager to see those elusive and fascinating things, marginal costs, brought into play: to let prices follow the constantly shifting value of an aircraft seat as demand changed or departure time loomed, or indeed as shiny new jet planes depreciated above him, just “marginal costs with wings”.

January 19, 2011

Dire Straits not suffering due to CBSC ban

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Dire Straits may need to send a nice gift basket to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council after they banned the song Money for nothing:

Britney Spears’ return with “Hold It Against Me” say 37,000 downloads, which is the best-ever first week performance ever since SoundScan started tracking digital sales six years ago. Avril Lavigne also did all right with 16,000 downloads of “What the Hell.”

But here’s my favourite stat: what with all the hoopla of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ruling on the unworthiness of Dire Straits “Money for Nothing,” digital downloads of that track went from 167 last week to about 2,700 this week. That number represents a full 10% of all downloads of that song since tracking began in February 2005. Meanwhile, Brothers in Arms, the album from whence the song came, saw its digital sales spike 406%. It’s now the fifth-best selling catalogue album in the nation.

H/T to Paul “Inkless” Wells for the link.

January 17, 2011

Smith and May illustrate the CBSC decision

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37


Link to news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110114/od_nm/us_canada_song_odd.

Cartoon from this week’s edition of Libertarian Enterprise.

January 13, 2011

Offensensitivity, the Canadian disease

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:46

Banned on the radio in Canada, but still (for the moment) legal on the internet:

Update, 14 January: I’ve been informed that this video isn’t playing for some, and it’s not working for me now either. I guess it’s another one of those content licensing issues. So I guess I’ll have to make this change:

Banned on the radio in Canada, but still (for the moment) legal on the internet. Banned on the radio in Canada, AND on the internet.

January 10, 2011

Kelly McParland on the bad old LCBO

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:22

Kelly McParland contrasts the Ontario government’s treatment of alcohol and tobacco as they’ve reversed position over time:

Ontario’s government-owned liquor monopoly operated bleak little dispensaries that had all the allure of an all-night pharmacy. No actual booze was allowed to be displayed, for fear the merest glimpse might turn solid citizens into a blubbering mass of addiction. You elbowed your way up to utilitarian counters with display boards that listed the limited products deemed acceptable for purchase. Using stubby little pencils, you scribbled down the name and code of the offending brand, then stood in line with similarly sad-sack individuals and handed your little list to a disapproving civil servant, who sent someone off to fetch your bottle and wrap it in a brown paper bag so as not to alarm any passing school marms or Sunday school teachers.

That was before the Ontario government realized just what a gold mine it had on its hands, and began redesigning liquor stores to serve as candy stores for grown-ups. Now there are free samples when you enter, kitchens to pass on recipes that encourage you to eat your booze as well as drink it, snob sections for high-priced wines and whiskies, and aisles full of expensive imported brews and hard-to-obtain craft beers, for people who only drink beer but want to feel just as snooty as everyone else.

I wrote about the bad old days of the LCBO back in my first year of blogging:

A few elections ago, the Ontario government under Premier Mike Harris started talking about getting the government out of the liquor business. The LCBO, which up until that point had operated like a sluggish version of the Post Office, suddenly had plenty of incentive to try appealing to their customers. Until the threat of privatization, the LCBO was notorious for poor service, lousy retail practices, and surly staff. Until the 1980’s, many LCBO outlets were run exactly like a warehouse: you didn’t actually get to see what was for sale, you only had a grubby list of current stock from which to write down your selections on pick tickets, which were then (eventually) filled by the staff.

If the intent was to make buying a bottle of wine feel grubby, seamy, and uncomfortable, they were masters of the craft. No shopper freshly arrived from behind the Iron Curtain would fail to recognize the atmosphere in an old LCBO outlet.

During the 1980’s, most LCBO stores finally became self-service, which required some attempt by the staff to stock shelves, mop the floors, and generally behave a bit more like a normal retail operation. It took quite some time for the atmosphere to become any more congenial or welcoming, as the staff were all unionized and most had worked there for years under the old regime — you might almost say that they had to die off and be replaced by younger employees who didn’t remember the “good old days”.

Now, contrast that with the way tobacco products — which used to be sold just about everywhere (and to anyone) — are now the pariah of the retail world:

Meanwhile, anyone desperate enough to buy a pack of cigarettes has been reduced to the status of those sorry, forlorn customers who used to slip into LCBOs hoping not to be recognized. The latest government regulations will increase the size of the warning labels and the sheer gore of the illustrations. To catch a glimpse of the rotting teeth and ulcerated organs you have to ask someone to fetch you a pack from the nondescript, unlabelled shelves behind the counter, where they used to keep the dirty magazines before we started getting our porn free online. Fierce competition and viticultural advances have relentlessly pushed down the price of booze so that wholly acceptable products are available at ever more reasonable prices; tobacco prices, meanwhile, are so prohibitive they’ve spawned a cross-border smuggling trade that would have impressed Al Capone.

I’m not kidding about the “sold to anyone” line either: I was regularly sent to the store to buy cigarattes for my parents even before I was in my teens. The odd punctilious shopkeeper would occasionally require a note from an adult, but generally they didn’t even bother asking.

January 7, 2011

How not to handle public health issues like influenza

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

I was astonished to hear a radio reporter yesterday admit that much of the reason for the drop in people getting flu shots is the massively overblown oh-my-god-we’re-all-going-to-die media panic last year over Swine flu H1N1. In case you somehow managed to miss out on it last year, every news broadcast seemed to feature yet another doctor or public health official telling us that we faced a worldwide pandemic of H1N1 which was the invincible, all-conquering Überflu to top all plagues we’d ever faced before. Death tolls in the millions were confidently predicted. Every individual who died seemed to be mentioned personally . . . because there were so relatively few compared to those poor folks who died of “ordinary” seasonal flu.

Lorne Gunter gives a bit of credit where it’s due:

Give Allison McGeer credit for being frank about what’s behind this winter’s flu outbreak in Ontario: unnecessary panic over last year’s swine flu “pandemic.” Dr. McGeer, head of infection control at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, says flu cases are way up this season because vaccinations are way down; and vaccinations are way down, likely, because too much was made of the swine flu by media and officialdom last winter.

It is a medical case of the doctors who cried wolf, in other words.

[. . .]

There is a fine line between erring on the side of caution and crying wolf. And last year, the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) blew through that barrier with abandon.

Just as it had on SARS and bird flu and the Ebola virus, the WHO overreacted to swine flu, issuing cautions that were out of all proportion to the risk the disease posed to the public. (Remember in 2003 when the WHO recommended people from around the world stay away from Toronto because the city was host to a few hundred SARS infections?)

But unlike those earlier panics, the WHO pulled out every stop on swine flu. It was as if the UN agency had been surprised that its earlier scares had failed to grow into full-blown pandemics; and so they figured that, finally, swine flu was due to become a worldwide infection requiring a dramatic response from international health officials.

As I wrote last year in May, when even the most panic-stricken media outlets were no longer playing the JuggernautOfDoom theme:

This would have been a good opportunity for de-escalating the panic mongering (and perhaps even attempting to rein-in the media, who were equally to blame for the tone of the information getting to the public). They chose, instead, to actively hide the fact that H1N1 cases were running below the level of ordinary seasonal flu cases (total H1N1 deaths: approximately 18,000 — typical annual death toll from seasonal flu: 250,000-500,000).

The biggest problem isn’t that they over-reacted this time, it’s that it has reduced their credibility the next time they start issuing health warnings. And that’s a bad thing. Unless they pull the same stunt next time, too. In which case, we may start hearing talk about setting up competing organizations to do the job the current entities appear to have given up on.

January 3, 2011

Healthy skepticism about study results

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:30

John Allen Paulos provides some useful mental tools to use when presented with unlikely published findings from various studies:

Ioannidis examined the evidence in 45 well-publicized health studies from major journals appearing between 1990 and 2003. His conclusion: the results of more than one third of these studies were flatly contradicted or significantly weakened by later work.

The same general idea is discussed in “The Truth Wears Off,” an article by Jonah Lehrer that appeared last month in the New Yorker magazine. Lehrer termed the phenomenon the “decline effect,” by which he meant the tendency for replication of scientific results to fail — that is, for the evidence supporting scientific results to seemingly weaken over time, disappear altogether, or even suggest opposite conclusions.

[. . .]

One reason for some of the instances of the decline effect is provided by regression to the mean, the tendency for an extreme value of a random quantity dependent on many variables to be followed by a value closer to the average or mean.

[. . .]

This phenomenon leads to nonsense when people attribute the regression to the mean as the result of something real, rather than to the natural behavior of any randomly varying quantity.

[. . .]

In some instances, another factor contributing to the decline effect is sample size. It’s become common knowledge that polls that survey large groups of people have a smaller margin of error than those that canvass a small number. Not just a poll, but any experiment or measurement that examines a large number of test subjects will have a smaller margin of error than one having fewer subjects.

Not surprisingly, results of experiments and studies with small samples often appear in the literature, and these results frequently suggest that the observed effects are quite large — at one end or the other of the large margin of error. When researchers attempt to demonstrate the effect on a larger sample of subjects, the margin of error is smaller and so the effect size seems to shrink or decline.

[. . .]

Publication bias is, no doubt, also part of the reason for the decline effect. That is to say that seemingly significant experimental results will be published much more readily than those that suggest no experimental effect or only a small one. People, including journal editors, naturally prefer papers announcing or at least suggesting a dramatic breakthrough to those saying, in effect, “Ehh, nothing much here.”

The availability error, the tendency to be unduly influenced by results that, for one reason or another, are more psychologically available to us, is another factor. Results that are especially striking or counterintuitive or consistent with experimenters’ pet theories also more likely will result in publication.

December 31, 2010

Hidden agendas come to light in “Little Ethiopia” debate

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

An article at the Globe and Mail pushes the idea of designating part of Danforth Avenue in Toronto as “Little Ethiopia”. The comments were far more interesting than the original article, especially some rather inflammatory comments from “Gus66” (some of these comments have already been removed by the G&M moderators):

Canadian Centralist: “People don’t want to live in a foreign community. That is why immigrants what to live with people from their own race, that is why they want “little” communities from home. If home was so great, why did they leave in the first place?”

Gus66: “C.C. Go back to Pickering and live in your nanas basement…..!”

[. . .]

sore throat: “The statement was made that there would be no tax implications.

“We heard that before, in another ethnic situtation, and when the dust settled it was proven to indeed require tax dollars.

“Just saying blanket statments such as you made will come back to bite your butt. And you can keep your modern multicultural and pluralistic society — give me a totally integrated societly with no enclaves for any ethnic group anytime.”

Canadian Centralist: “Special interest groups always require taxpayer funds.”

Gus66: “Deepest throat I saw your name on Kyle Rae’s contribution list…When it’s rainbow flags it’s okay but when people want to spend their own money we call them freeloaders. Which gay couple are you?”

[. . .]

Nick Barlas: “Since the time DECA [Danforth East Community Association] started our neighbourhood has become bullied. No class, no honesty from your residents who only care about ramming their interests down everybody’s throats. I loathe the days people like you migrated back into the cities. You came back into the “ethnic” neighbourhoods and now you are bossing immigrants around? You guys are shameless and deserve to be sued. I hope your names get published and you are expressing your views as DECA because you deserve to be sued.”

[. . .]

Gus66: “landed immigrant in East York, home of the European people who’ve been living there and owning the area. All of sudden we have a bunch of snot faced yoyos telling us what to do?

“First of all, go pay your mortgage. Not a member = no rights, so shut your pie hole!

“Second, get off your little ponies… You own squat on another street and have no business telling businesses what to do with their money or how to manage their affairs. That is up to the businesses.

“Why don’t you stroll down the street with your nuncycles to some other hoods and try to pull this stunt on those BIAs? Hate mongerers. Because you think you’re smarter than the landlords and businesses in the area? Whose respect do you command? Own nothing, sitting on your well-fed behinds. You’re talking about tax payer respect with Rob Ford, newsflash geniuses, business people support Rob Ford, snot nosed DECA geeks do not and are a bunch of flaky NDPers and NOTHING MORE.

“You’re worse than maggots and parasite…sucking up someone else’s blood for yourselves. Bunch of cheap bimbos who pretend they care but really a bunch of spineless buffoons.”

[. . .]

Gus66: “Who are you weasels? I suggest you send a registered mail of yourselves to that BIA. I have four buildings just on that street and I will not put up with your antics. I have buildings all over the city, paid off, yes my grease haired g-parents came to this country like these immigrants do every day to make a living. Got a problem with that? No landmass belongs to anyone people. We all have rights, stuff it.

“Greeks started off in the back of the kitchen. Now the Sri Lankans who were in the back are buying stores. Are you going to go to their stores and tell them you don’t want them to have a chance before they started?

“TRY DEMOCRACY, not HARASSING stores. I’ve got dozens of stores all around the city and you people are the biggest goof balls. If you want your hood to improve, shove your winy twats over and let the real business people make decisions for themselves.

“I’ll rent all my stores to these people. They pay their rent, they’re clean and they RESPECT. One way or another, all your kind does is look for freebies and drink beer at your houses….”

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