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 30, 2011

QotD: The baby blue movies

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

In the late ’70s in Toronto, Citytv started showing “blue movies” at 11 p.m. every Friday. Pretty soon, every kid was asking their parents if they could sleep over at whatever kid had an unsupervised TV set in the basement. The films were pretty lame: convict gets out of jail; convict tries to integrate himself into society; convict is rejected by an unforgiving society. There was a vague social message, but all kids like me cared about was whether or not the stripper with the heart of gold was going to take off her tank top (she was). A few years later, cable started showing scrambled porn in the middle of the night. My friends called these films the “fuzzy blues,” remembering times when kids would crouch in front of the set, imagining a boob here, a crotch there, until inevitably, a penis would flash across the screen, rejecting the attention of everyone but Edward. These days, not only are the blues unscrambled, but titillation and nudity comes so easily, it’s a wonder kids today haven’t decided to dress in Mennonite vests and long hats in an attempt to rebel against all of this mainstream sexual telegenia. A teen show with sex in it? Show me a teen show without sex, and maybe we’d have something to discuss.

Dave Bidini, “It’s a friggin’ nuclear Technicolor smutfest!”, National Post, 2011-01-30

January 29, 2011

Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance gets some international attention

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

An article in The Economist reports on the state of play in the Alberta political realm:

Mr Stelmach seems to have been pushed out by his own party’s fiscal hawks, led by Ted Morton, his finance minister. The premier wanted to balance the budget gradually, without big cuts to services. Mr Morton, a leader of the party’s right-wing brought in by Mr Stelmach last year, wants fiscal balance now. Mr Morton and his allies in the party worry about the rise of the Wildrose Alliance, a libertarian, small-government group which won its first seat in the legislature in a by-election in 2009 but has since attracted three Conservative defectors and drawn close to the ruling party in some opinion polls. Its leader, Danielle Smith, sparkles in comparison to the Conservatives’ dull suits.

More surprisingly, the left is also showing signs of life in the shape of the Alberta Party, a moribund group newly revived last October by two smaller outfits. It gained a voice in the legislature when a former Liberal elected as an independent said he would represent the new party. The Liberals have been shunned in Alberta since the 1980s when a Liberal federal government imposed an energy plan widely seen by westerners as benefiting the rest of Canada at their expense. But with its new and different banner, the Alberta Party will hope to attract centrists dismayed by the Conservatives’ impending lurch further to the right.

Mr Morton, beaten by Mr Stelmach in a leadership election in 2006, may now take over as Conservative leader. He might steal the Wildrose ground. But Albertans have a habit of rejecting former governing parties so decisively that they disappear from the political landscape. That happened with the Social Credit party in 1971 and the United Farmers in 1935.

January 25, 2011

Margaret Wente: Harper has found the “sweet spot” in Canadian politics

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:14

Margaret Wente is sympathetic to her Liberal friends:

I’ve been feeling kind of sorry for my liberal friends. They can’t stand Stephen Harper. They wince when they hear his name. And yet, in spite of his disagreeable personality, his grip on power is stronger than ever. He has lasted an improbable five years. He has run the longest minority government in Canada’s history and held office longer than Lester Pearson. Aaargh!

On the radio Monday, a Liberal academic was explaining just what makes Mr. Harper so despicable. He’s been stealing Liberal policies! Now that’s dirty. Everyone was certain he would move the country to the right. Instead, he moved the party to the left. He racked up stimulus deficits by the billions and expanded the size of government. He pleased the people by handing them deductions for their kids’ hockey gear. He even quashed an unpopular foreign takeover — only the second veto of a foreign bid in 25 years. The Financial Post went nuts. Who does this guy think he is — Maude Barlow?

Put another way, for everyone who’s attacking Mr. Harper for being too conservative, someone else is attacking him for not being conservative enough. In politics, this is known as “finding the sweet spot.” Both the Liberals and the right-wing National Citizens’ Coalition, which he used to head, are accusing him of reckless spending. Even Peter Mansbridge challenged him for failing to live up to his small-c conservative ideals. (I wonder how the conversation would have gone if Mr. Harper had slashed the CBC.)

Wente may well be right, but I wonder how long Harper can keep the small-c conservatives happy while he does a very credible imitation of Paul Martin’s Liberal government. They wanted a change, but this is a change in labels, not in actual policies.

To be fair, Harper has been able to provide a more distinctive foreign policy than Martin would have done: his outspoken support for Israel is more than enough to set him apart from his Liberal predecessor. On domestic issues? The difference is much more in tone than in substance. On some issues, Michael Ignatieff is running to the right of Harper, which unnerves his own party no end.

The genomic treasure trove of Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:36

Thanks to relatively thorough genealogical records, the people of Quebec are of great and growing interest to genetic researchers:

One of the great things about the mass personal genomic revolution is that it allows people to have direct access to their own information. This is important for the more than 90% of the human population which has sketchy genealogical records. But even with genealogical records there are often omissions and biases in transmission of information. This is one reason that HAP, Dodecad, and Eurogenes BGA are so interesting: they combine what people already know with scientific genealogy. This intersection can often be very inferentially fruitful.

But what about if you had a whole population with rich robust conventional genealogical records? Combined with the power of the new genomics you could really crank up the level of insight. Where to find these records? A reason that Jewish genetics is so useful and interesting is that there is often a relative dearth of records when it comes to the lineages of American Ashkenazi Jews. Many American Jews even today are often sketchy about the region of the “Old Country” from which their forebears arrived. Jews have been interesting from a genetic perspective because of the relative excess of ethnically distinctive Mendelian disorders within their population. There happens to be another group in North America with the same characteristic: the French Canadians. And importantly, in the French Canadian population you do have copious genealogical records. The origins of this group lay in the 17th and 18th century, and the Roman Catholic Church has often been a punctilious institution when it comes to preserving events under its purview such as baptisms and marriages. The genealogical archives are so robust that last fall a research group input centuries of ancestry for ~2,000 French Canadians, and used it to infer patterns of genetic relationships as a function of geography, as well as long term contribution by provenance.

January 24, 2011

Recognizing the right to self-defence

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:38

Lorne Gunter wants our government to recognize that Canadians have a right to self-defence:

Canadian officialdom is conducting an all-out assault against self-defence. Quite simply, few politicians, Crown prosecutors, judges, law professors and police commanders believe ordinary Canadians have any business using force to defend themselves, their loved ones, homes, farms or businesses.

The latest example of the campaign against self-defence comes from southern Ontario. In August, retired crane operator Ian Thomson, who lives near Port Colborne, awoke early in the morning to find masked men attempting to burn his house down with him in it. When he fired at them with a licensed handgun he had stored in a safe, he was charged.

How out-of-touch are police and prosecutors when you are not even allowed to defend yourself and your property from thugs attempting to incinerate you? Their attitude seems to be that it is better to die waiting for police to respond than to take matters into your own hands.

[. . .]

When Canada became independent at Confederation in 1867, Canadians retained the rights they had at the time as British subjects. These included three “absolute rights”: the right to personal liberty, the right to private property and the right to self-defence, up to and including the right to kill an attacker or burglar.

William Blackstone, Britain’s famous constitutional expert, argued the right to self-defence included the right to kill even an agent of the king found on one’s property after dark, uninvited. He also traced the right to armed self-defence back to the time of King Canute (995–1035) when subjects could be fined for failing to keep weapons for their own protection.

January 22, 2011

QotD: Sikhs, the kirpan, and the courts

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Quotations, Religion, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

The [Supreme] court didn’t find for the appellants on the grounds that “the kirpan is not a weapon”. Indeed, all parties to the suit accepted the premise “that the kirpan, considered objectively and without the protective measures imposed by the Superior Court, is an object that fits the definition of a weapon.” The court found for the appellant because the school board’s zero-tolerance policy towards weapons, based largely on fears that the presence of a knife would somehow allow spooky negative vibes to propagate throughout the school, did not constitute a minimal infringement upon the rights of a religion that happens to insist upon the carrying of a weapon. (Anyone who has studied the remarkable history of the Sikhs can only be surprised that they don’t carry about five of them.)

I hate to break it to Nav Bains and to admirers of leading comparative-religion scholar Michael Ignatieff, but reciting “It’s not a weapon” won’t give us a magic wormhole we can all leap through to avoid debates over religious accommodation in public services. As I understand matters, and I am perfectly prepared to receive instruction on this point, the whole point of the kirpan is that it’s an avowedly defensive weapon. The reference books, including those written by Sikhs, tell us that it is worn precisely to signify and reinforce the Sikh’s wholly admirable preparedness to protect his faith, his community, and innocent human life. I suppose I could have added the words “just as a handgun might be”, but that would send altogether too many of my readers scrambling for the Preparation H.

Respectable efforts to establish a modus vivendi on the kirpan in secured public spaces can’t begin with evasion if they hope to be successful (and certainly it sets a terrible precedent for evasion to be designated courage). I’ll add that the problems are not really all that thorny for those of us who have never consented to fanaticism about security theatre or to cretinizing “zero tolerance” of blades in schools

Colby Cosh, “That non-weapon sure is pointy”, Maclean’s, 2011-01-21

January 20, 2011

QotD: The ongoing retreat of freedom of speech in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:04

It used to be there actually had to be a violent protest before public institutions caved in and cancelled controversial events. That was unjustifiable, too. Police and officials should always seek to protect law-abiding speakers and organizers from the angry mob. Those who seek to disrupt events just because they disagree with the speakers should be the ones inconvenienced, not those exercising their constitutional rights.

Now, though, it seems the mere whiff of protest is enough for officialdom to bow to would-be protestors’ demands. Get together a group of unhinged radicals or zealots in someone’s rumpus room, make a couple of angry phone calls and — poof! — you can get your way and silence free speech and free assembly. Organizers, especially those connected with public institutions such as universities, museums and galleries, apparently care not a whit about free expression or individual choice. Their first instinct is to crater to protestors; let the forces of oppression and extremism have their way. Forget about preserving democracy and open debate, officials will act as the forces of censorship want.

Some of this has to do with the increased anger and vehemence of protestors, no doubt. In recent years, young lefties in particular have convinced themselves that only their positions are fact-based and only their positions can save the world. All other opinions are lies, as well as being threats to mankind and the planet. Therefore they are justified in any action they take to stymie opposing views, which they also believe are unworthy of free speech protection. They truly believe they are doing a public service when they shout down speakers or force the cancellation of events by smashing windows or jostling attendees outside the doors.

Lorne Gunter, “We’ve become a wimpy state, as well as a nanny state”, National Post, 2011-01-20

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 16, 2011

Caledonia discussed on “The Agenda”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 22:13

Publius has a post up with the interview of Christie Blatchford, author of Helpless on Steve Paikin’s TVO show The Agenda.

January 15, 2011

Toronto really isn’t part of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

If Toronto was part of Canada, why would a forecast of five centimetres of snow (that’s about two inches) require a special weather statement from Environment Canada?

Really, Toronto? Five measly centimetres and you need a special “OMG! Snow!” notice from the weather folks? That’s too silly for parody.

I mentioned it to Elizabeth before starting this post, and she suggested that it’s another attempt to set up the media template for next year: “Look at the huge increase in special weather statements for the GTA over the last few years. Clearly this proves [global warming | climate change | climate chaos] is real.”

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 11, 2011

It’s not your imagination, Toronto area commuters

Filed under: Cancon, Economics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:00

Canadians often have a disturbing eagerness to see themselves coming out atop various world rankings. Let a UN agency or a big NGO list Canada in the top five of any kind of list and they practically declare a national day of celebration . . . it’s kinda pathetic, actually.

Andrew Coyne finds a list that nobody in Canada will find as a source of national pride:

Indeed, for sheer mind-numbing, soul-destroying aggravation, traffic in our largest cities can compete with any in the developed world. A Toronto Board of Trade report earlier this year looked at commuting times in 19 major European and North American cities. Toronto’s ranking? Dead last: worse than New York or London, worse than Los Angeles. But other Canadian cities were scarcely better. Montreal was 18th, Vancouver 14th, Calgary 13th, Halifax 10th.

So, what’s the answer? Ban private vehicles and load everybody into mass transit? If anything would turn Canadians away from their “peace loving” self-image, that might well do it. Canadians love their cars as much as any other western country and more than most. There’s also the fact that for most commuters, taking public transit would increase, not decrease their commuting time.

The reason is simple: it’s quicker by car. As bad as the commute is for drivers, it’s much worse for public transit users: 106 minutes, versus 63 minutes by car. Granted, part of the reason it takes so long to get anywhere by transit is because of all the cars blocking the way. But you’d have to persuade an awful lot of those drivers to give up the comfort and convenience of their cars to put much of a dent in that. And they’d still take longer to get to work even then.

So, what’s the answer? Toll roads.

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.

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