Quotulatiousness

January 25, 2013

The wrong maple leaf forever: the new $20 bill controversy

Filed under: Cancon, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Oh, hang your heads in shame, Canadians: you put the wrong maple leaf on your new $20 bill. The entire rest of the civilized world is laughing and pointing:

The mix-up began a hundred-some years ago when Canada, a small club founded by French misfit children, decided to create its own currency. These bills and coins would function much the same as Chuck E. Cheese tickets at a modern-day Chuck E. Cheese, in that it would be tradeable for goods (and services). It would be valid in all of Canada.

For many years, the system was a success. Canadians used their Canadian money with ease. Every once in a while a Canadian penny or dime would slip down into the United States but that was no big deal because all the coins look about the same and everyone could just leave them in tip jars, like “not my problem.”

Then, in 2011, Canada decided to redesign their banknotes.

“Paper is out and polymer is IN!” Canada exclaimed in an email newsletter that the rest of the world deleted without reading.

The new bills were made out of plastic. They had fancy updated pictures and a holographic whoozy-whatsits and a big clear window to make them harder to counterfeit.

They featured a big ol’ maple leaf.

But not a Canadian maple leaf.

A Norwegian one.

“Big deal,” you say. “Leaves are leaves; who cares?”

The problem is that maple leaves are Canada’s thing. Like how some nations’ thing is communism, or being the world economic leader, or producing generation after generation of beautiful supermodels. Canada’s thing is that there are leaves there.

And they fucked it up.

H/T to David Akin for the link.

January 20, 2013

Pennsylvania quashes latest terror threat

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

This story is not taken from the pages of The Onion:

The incident occurred Jan. 10 while the girl was waiting in line for a school bus, said Robin Ficker, the Maryland lawyer retained by the girl’s family. He would not identify the girl or her parents, but gave this version of events:

Talking with a friend, the girl said something to the effect “I’m going to shoot you and I will shoot myself” in reference to the device that shoots out bubbles. The girl did not have the bubble gun with her and has never shot a real gun in her life, Ficker said.

Elementary school officials learned of the conversation and questioned the girls the next day, Fickler said. He said the girl did not have a parent present during the 30 minutes of questioning.

The result, he said, was that the student was labeled a “terrorist threat” and suspended for 10 days, Ficker said. The school also required her to be evaluated by a psychologist, Ficker said.

This designated terrorist is five.

H/T to Dan Mitchell for the link.

We also need to protect our kids from being exposed to bureaucrats who are jaw-droppingly stupid.

Actually, WordPress is telling me that “droppingly” isn’t a word. So maybe instead we should take Instapundit’s advice and reward these idiot officials with some tar and feathers.

And I hope the tattle-tale punk from the bus stop who ratted out the little girls is condemned to some sort of grade-school purgatory featuring never-ending wedgies.

On a more serious note, I hope the parents sue the you-know-what out of the school.

January 17, 2013

Borrowing from theoretical physics, we now have “Quantum Copyright”

Filed under: Books, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

At Techdirt, Tim Cushing explores the legal phase changes that introduce heretofore unknown states of copyright:

Eric Hellman tackles the ambiguous nature of copyright infringement, especially as it pertains to the “region-free” aspects of the internet, in a post amusingly titled, “Heisenberg’s Uncertain Copyright.” (via The Digital Reader)

Hellman turns his attention to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and using his skills in the area of “Quantum Copyright” (a term he threw into his LinkedIn profile for a bit of fun), determines that the question of whether or not copyright infringement has occurred might depend on where the copying occurred, something that is even harder to define when the copying takes place via the internet.

[. . .]

While Hellman exaggerates the repercussions of making a hypothetical copy (the highest statutory claims would apply only to willful infringement [which this could be, especially when infringing in order to prove a hypothesis] and the jail time only applies to criminal infringement — which this almost certainly would not be), the fact remains that one deterrent of infringement is the underlying threat of legal action (whether civil or criminal). No doubt F. Scott Fitzgerald’s estate is in no hurry to give up the American rights (and the attendant enforcement of those rights), seeing as The Great Gatsby earned its author all of $8,400 during his lifetime — but generates $500,000 per year for his daughter. This secondhand largesse enjoyed by many heirs is one of the motivators behind the ever-extending copyright lengths here in this country.

[. . .]

Certainly, copyright-centered entities like the MPAA would prefer to simply have our copyright laws exported to other countries with less stringent laws, especially any sections that extend the length of copyright protection and weaken fair use/fair dealing exceptions. Getting other nations to sync up with our copyright lengths would certainly eliminate these hypothetical discussions, along with many items in the public domain. Many aspects of current copyright laws were written years ago, long before the internet made “country of origin” a meaningless term and reproductions as simple as a right-click on a mouse. What it usually boils down to, after all the discussion, is this:

    You could also be a cynic and say the only thing that matters is where the judge is sitting.

Much like fair use is often determined by a courtroom appearance, the “quantum” aspects of copyright are largely theoretical — right up to the point that someone finds themselves at the other end of an infringement lawsuit.

January 16, 2013

When Kafka met Sandy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

In the Wall Street Journal, Roger Kimball talks about the experience of trying to put your life back together after a major storm damages your home:

Like many people whose houses were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, my family and I have been living in a rented house since the storm. Unlike some whose houses were totalled, we could have repaired things and been home toasting our tootsies by our own fireplace by now. What happened?

Two things: zoning (as in “Twilight Zone”) and FEMA.

Our first exposure to the town zoning authorities came a couple of weeks after Sandy. We’d met with insurance adjusters, contractors and “remediation experts.” We’d had about a foot of Long Island Sound sloshing around the ground floor of our house in Connecticut, and everyone had the same advice: Rip up the floors and subfloors, and tear out anything — wiring, plumbing, insulation, drywall, kitchen cabinets, bookcases — touched by salt water. All of it had to go, and pronto, too, lest mold set in.

Yet it wasn’t until the workmen we hired had ripped apart most of the first floor that the phrase “building permit” first wafted past us. Turns out we needed one. “What, to repair our own house we need a building permit?”

Of course.

Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning — citing FEMA regulations — would force you to bring the house “up to code,” which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming — not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits.

Kafka would have liked the zoning folks. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can’t raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that?

“A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, this paradox.”

H/T to Monty for the link. Monty also has this meditation on bureaucracy:

This is where Leviathan does the most damage, I think. Tyranny is always a danger in centralized governments, but a greater danger is the proliferation and growth of bureaucracies. The rules become ever more Byzantine, ever more contradictory, ever more pointless, and ever more expensive (both to implement and comply with). The bureaucracies themselves achieve a life outside the body politic: they persist, age after age, irrespective of their political origin. Their sole imperative (regardless of their ostensible purpose) is to perpetuate themselves. They are an amoeba, growing to engulf everything they touch — not because they are evil, necessarily, but simply because it’s in their nature to do so. They cannot help themselves. Bureaucracies — lethargic, slow, risk-averse, rules-bound, pedantic, expensive, often causing more harm than good — are perhaps the very worst creation of human society.

January 9, 2013

Why stop at a mere trillion dollars?

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Zero Hedge on the trillion dollar platinum coin nonsense:

A year ago, out of nowhere, the grotesque suggestion to “resolve” the US debt ceiling with a platinum dollar coin came, and like a bad dream, mercifully disappeared even as the debt ceiling negotiations dragged until the last minute, without this idea being remotely considered for implementation, for one simple reason: it is sheer political, monetary and financial lunacy. And yet there are those, supposedly intelligent people, who one year later, continue dragging this ridiculous farce, as a cheap parlor trick which is nothing but a transparent attempt for media trolling and exposure, which only distracts from America’s unsustainable spending problem and does nothing to address the real crisis the US welfare state finds itself in. And while numerous respected people have taken the time to explain the stupidity of the trillion dollar coin, few have done so as an integral part of the statist mainstream for one simple reason — it might provide a loophole opportunity, however tiny, to perpetuate the broken American model even for a day or two, if “everyone is in on it.” Luckily, that is no longer the case and as even Ethan Harris from Bank of America (a firm that would be significantly impaired if America was forced to suddenly live within its means), the whole idea is nothing more than “the latest bad idea” straight “from the land of fiscal make believe.” We can only hope that this finally puts this whole farce to bed.

[. . .]

Taking these sorts of actions would almost certainly worsen, not ease, the coming battles over the spending — a second reason to be skeptical of the idea of the trillion dollar coin. As we have noted before, the debt ceiling is just one of three brinkmanship moments looming in the next few months. The across-the-board spending cuts that constitute the sequester have only been delayed for two months, and absent new legislation, will start in March. Even more troubling, on March 27 the latest continuing resolution ends and, absent new legislation, all nonessential government programs would have to shut down for lack of funding.

Third, throwing the trillion dollar coin into this mix would not only intensify these two other fights, it would likely poison the well even further in future budget negotiations. With split government, fiscal policy making requires bipartisan agreement. The cliff compromise earned support from both parties, marking a welcome — if brief — respite from partisan politics. The last thing Washington needs is a further escalation in gamesmanship.

Finally, there is a slippery slope from avoiding the debt limit to outright debt monetization. Although proponents see it as a technical fix to a problem that, in their view, never should occur, it means the Treasury would have established a precedent to thwart Congressional limitations on spending and the debt ceiling.

Outside of the legal questions, nothing precludes the Treasury from issuing a coin to pay down the full $16.4 trillion in debt in one fell swoop: true monetization. A trillion dollar coin also would subvert the whole budget process, undermining already fragile public confidence and spooking financial markets. And based on the criteria put forth by the rating agencies, it would represent a stunning failure to devise credible political processes to resolve the longer-term budget issues for the US. A downgrade would very likely follow, in our view.

January 3, 2013

Irish newspapers want to be paid when you link to them

Filed under: Business, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

Ireland is an odd place, if this little brainstorm from their newspaper industry is any indication:

This is not a joke.

I have started with that clarification, because as you read this you will find yourself asking “Is this some kind of a joke?” I thought I would be helpful and put the answer right up at the start, so you can refer back to it as often as you require.

This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links -just bare links like this one- belonged to them. They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed.

These assertions were not merely academic positions. The Newspaper Industry (all these newspapers) had its agent write out demanding money. They wrote to Women’s Aid, (amongst others) who became our clients when they received letters, emails and phone calls asserting that they needed to buy a licence because they had linked to articles in newspapers carrying positive stories about their fundraising efforts.

These are the prices for linking they were supplied with:

1 – 5 €300.00
6 – 10 €500.00
11 – 15 €700.00
16 – 25 €950.00
26 – 50 €1,350.00
50 + Negotiable

They were quite clear in their demands. They told Women’s Aid “a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website.”

The rational response here is to honour their request … by pretending they’ve dropped off the internet altogether and never linking to any of the Irish newspaper websites.

December 12, 2012

Offensensitivity down under

Filed under: Australia, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

Australia is exploring the notion of making it illegal to offend others (I guess it got precedence over the bill to make water run uphill…):

Have you ever called the Prime Minister ‘Juliar’? Or called a mate a dopey bastard? New laws could put a stop to name calling.

Civil Liberties Australia (CLA) warn the PM herself could be in trouble for calling Opposition Leader Tony Abbott a misogynist if proposed amendments to anti-discrimination laws take effect — although Julia Gillard has the protection of Parliamentary privilege.

What about cricket sledging, or paying out on a mate?

CLA chief executive officer Bill Rowlings has lashed out at the proposed amendments to anti-discrimination laws which make it unlawful to “offend” people.

His attack follows ABC chairman Jim Spigelman’s scathing appraisal this week — he said that the laws could breach our international obligations to freedom of speech.

Update: Of course, it’s rather unfair of me to point my finger and laugh at our Australian cousins when Albertans get up to similar japes of a quasi-legal kind:

One is surprised to discover that Hanna felt it needed to outlaw theft and assault, and also amused to contemplate the idea of a court trying to define “social out-casting”. But it turns out, anyway, that the law does not actually outlaw bullying! It instead does a bizarre half-gainer and prohibits the making-of-someone-feel-as-though-they-are-being-bullied.

    1. No person shall, in any public place:

         a. Communicate either directly or indirectly, with any person in a way that causes the person, reasonably in all the circumstances, to feel bullied.

To prove an offence under this scheme, one apparently only needs to show that one felt taunted, put down, or outcast. (Felt “reasonably”, that is. I would have thought the salient characteristic of feelings is that they are not reason, but there you go.) The Hanna Herald has said the bylaw is “based on similar laws passed around Alberta.” One hopes that this is not the case, but readers are invited to submit local intelligence. If we can call it that.

November 22, 2012

Even in a disaster area, the bureaucrats stick to their role

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:49

I had to double-check the URL here to make sure this wasn’t a parody news item from The Onion:

Bobby Eustace, an 11-year veteran with the city’s fire department tells FoxNews.com that on Sunday he and his fellow firefighters from Ladder 27 in the Bronx were issued a notice of violation for not maintaining restaurant standards in a tent set up in Breezy Point, Queens, to feed victims and first responders.

“It’s just a little ridiculous. The inspector came up and asked if we were wearing hairnets. I told him, ‘We have helmets. This is a disaster area,’” Eustace told FoxNews.com. “Then he asked if we had gloves and thermometers [for food]. I said, “Yeah, we have rectal and oral. Which one do you want?’ He wasn’t amused.”

Eustace says that the Health Department worker then checked off a list of violations at the relief tent, including not having an HVAC system and fire extinguisher.

“He told us that he might come back to see if we fixed the violations. But what can we do? We are just going to keep going until a professional catering company can help take over,” Eustace said, adding that firefighters across the city together have been contributing about $800 a day out of their own pockets to feeding victims in areas hit hard by Sandy.

November 21, 2012

The Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness returns

Filed under: Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:21

Darren Barefoot has revived the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness as a Pinterest site:

November 17, 2012

A new low in patents?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Apple has patented the “page turn”:

If you want to know just how broken the patent system is, just look at patent D670,713, filed by Apple and approved this week by the United States Patent Office.

This design patent, titled, “Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface,” gives Apple the exclusive rights to the page turn in an e-reader application.

Yes, that’s right. Apple now owns the page turn. You know, as when you turn a page with your hand. An “interface” that has been around for hundreds of years in physical form. I swear I’ve seen similar animation in Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons.

(This is where readers are probably checking the URL of this article to make sure it’s The New York Times and not The Onion.)

October 23, 2012

Canada’s foreign investment “net benefit” test is a farce

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:15

Andrew Coyne scrambles to find the right words to describe the indescribable:

The existing rules, as readers will know, require that a foreign takeover be of “net benefit” to Canada. How this is to be demonstrated, how it is even defined, is a secret to which the bidder is not privy — understandably enough, since it is not known to the government either. The result may be compared to a game of blind man’s bluff, only with both players wearing blindfolds. The bidder makes repeated attempts to hit the mark, while the government shouts encouragingly, “warmer… ” or “cooler…” depending on its best guess of where the target happens to be at the time.

I’m joking, of course. In fact, there’s a perfectly clear definition of “net benefit.” As set out in section 20 of the Investment Canada Act, the minister is required to take into account the effect of the investment on “the level and nature of economic activity in Canada,” specifically (but “without limiting the generality of the foregoing”) “on employment, on resource processing, on the utilization of parts, components and services produced in Canada and on exports from Canada.” Clear enough, right?

[. . .]

All told, I count more than 20 different criteria to be applied, vague, elusive and contradictory as they are. Whether it is possible to measure even one of them in any objective fashion, still less all of them at the same time, may be doubted — but even if you could, the Act provides no benchmark of what is acceptable, separately or collectively. Neither does it say what weight should be given to each in the minister’s calculations, or even whether he strictly has to pay any of them any mind at all (“the factors to be taken into account, where relevant, are…”).

In other words, the whole thing is a charade, applying a veneer of objectivity to what remains an entirely subjective — not to say opaque, arbitrary and meaningless — process. Which is good, since any attempt to define such benchmarks, weights, etc would be even more arbitrary and meaningless. Because there isn’t any objective definition of “net benefit,” at least in the sense implied, nor is it necessary to invent one. We don’t need to clarify the net benefit test. We need to abolish it.

October 19, 2012

Minnesota takes a firm stance … against free education

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:43

If that headline sounds stupid, it’s only because it’s accurate:

Every day, it seems, we hear of yet another story of silly out-of-date regulations, which may have had a reasonable purpose initially, getting in the way of perfectly legitimate innovation. For example, there’s been a massive growth in “open courseware” or open education programs, that put various educational classes online for everyone to benefit. They’re not designed to replace the degrees of college, but rather to just help people learn. One of the biggest ones, Coursera, recently told people in Minnesota that they could no longer take Coursera classes, due to ridiculously outdated Minnesota regulations:

    Notice for Minnesota Users:

    Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.

Update: In the first of what promises to be a cascade of Minnesota-education-related announcements, Popehat is forced to introduce new terms of service for Minnesota residents:

Now circumstances require us to create special terms of use for Minnesota residents. See, some of you have occasionally said that, despite our best efforts and lack of relevant skills or experience, you occasionally learn something at Popehat […] That’s problematical in Minnesota.

You’d think that Minnesota residents should be free to learn whatever they want from any site on the internet. You’d be wrong. The State of Minnesota determines not just what degrees may be offered there, but how its residents may learn things on the internet.

[. . .]

Now, I think it’s unlikely that Popehat would be treated as subject to the statute. We’re not a learning institution and we don’t offer “courses,” per se, except in the sense of “a course of abuse.” But we can’t be too careful. We’re talking about a state that thinks it should dictate whether web sites in other states can make free online content available to its citizens. Who knows what they’ll do next? I don’t want to subject Popehat to Minnesota’s onerous disclosure requirements or pay fees or be subject to injunctions if some functionary within the Minnesota Office of Higher Education decides that Popehat is attempting to offer courses in, say, Spammer Communications. I don’t want to have to go to Minnesota to defend myself. Lakes make me itchy. Plus, my lovely wife spent only a couple of years there in the 1970s and I still laugh at her accent, so I’m concerned that legal proceedings there may not go my way.

Update, 22 October: Minnesota belatedly realizes that beclowning yourselves in front of an international audience is sub-optimal:

Last week, we were among those who reported on a ridiculous attempt by regulators in Minnesota to enforce a regulation aimed at stopping degree mills, by telling various legitimate online learning providers like Coursera that Minnesota residents couldn’t take courses from without state approval. Thankfully, all of the attention has caused Minnesota officials to admit that this was silly and back down. According to Larry Pogemiller, director of the Minnesota Office of Higher Education:

    Obviously, our office encourages lifelong learning and wants Minnesotans to take advantage of educational materials available on the Internet, particularly if they’re free. No Minnesotan should hesitate to take advantage of free, online offerings from Coursera.

October 18, 2012

Taking “blaming the victim” to school

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

The incident would probably make newspaper headlines anyway — “Middle school students find picture of topless teacher on school iPad” — but only in a crazy world are the kids punished for the teacher’s goof-up:

Some students at Highland Middle School in Anderson, Ind., got a peek of their teacher’s bare breasts on a school-issued iPad while in class.

Those students have been suspended and threatened with expulsion.

The school district said it has taken action against the teacher, but they wouldn’t specify what action, only that she is still a member of the school staff.

“The picture showed up of the teacher topless,” said Joshua Troutt, 13, describing the incident that occurred at Highland Middle School.

He and three other students were in their classroom, playing a game on a school-issued iPad.

He said one of the students pressed a button, and a photograph with his teacher’s bare chest was revealed.

“It’s not our fault that she had the photo on there,” Troutt said. “We couldn’t do anything not to look at it, if it just popped up when he pressed the button. It was her fault that she had the photo on there. Her iPhone synched to it. She had to have pressed something to make all of her photos synch on there.”

In which insane universe is this the kids’ fault?

October 15, 2012

“[T]he Nobel Peace Prize Committee [wouldn’t] recognize absurdity if it slapped them in the face and did a Macarena”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, History, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Marian L. Tupy writes about the absurdity of awarding this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union at the Cato@Liberty blog:

The esteemed members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee have awarded the 2012 prize to the European Union. So, if you thought that awarding it to President Barack Obama for the sole reason of not being George W. Bush was strange and unusual, think again. (By the way, I have nothing against our president. I am sure he was just as embarrassed as everyone else.)

[. . .]

As for democracy, the Peace Prize award to the EU drips with irony. The EU is not only un-democratic, in the sense that it is run by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, it is positively anti-democratic, in the sense that the democratically expressed wishes of the European peoples are either ignored or treated with contempt. When the Danes voted against the Maastricht Treaty, they were forced to vote again. When the Irish sunk the Lisbon treaty, they too had to repeat the vote. And when the Dutch and the French said no to the EU Constitution, they were simply ignored.

Here is how the president of the eurozone, Jean-Claude Juncker, sums up the decision-making process in the great bastion of democracy that is today’s EU: “We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”

I could write about the overgrown and arrogant bureaucracy in Brussels; about the monstrously high and recession-proof salaries of European decision makers; about widespread and widely tolerated corruption; about the prosecution and silencing of whistleblowers, and about many other ways in which the EU does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Suffice it to say that those have been widely documented and are available to anyone interested.

October 14, 2012

We’ve got to move these deer crossing signs to less heavily travelled roads!

Filed under: Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, who sent me the link to this item at Ace of Spades HQ, suggesting it was a former co-worker calling in.

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