but I love his accent and he is obviously very smart.
The interview with PCR begins after the host's interesting monologue.
In my view, THIS IS REAL NEWS, as opposed to that FUCKING deluge of HORSESHIT we are exposed to from from the (destroy Trump, drive-by, as Sean Hannity describes it,) mainstream media.
There is some station I tune into in my car, from time to time, that touts itself as providing "In depth news coverage." I always laugh when I hear that claim, because it is just so disgustingly obvious that the station provides NOTHING of the sort. Their so-called "coverage" of important news amounts to barely more than a few relevant, or misleading, keywords.
The phenomenon recently came into focus for me since I was away from my computer for a week or so, and found myself listening to news reports on the car radio.
If I were someone who truly believes that all I need to do is listen radio news to get all of the information I need ("in depth" ) in order to cast an intelligent vote, I would have been left with the impression that the chaos and death in Charlottesville was all caused by a bunch of insane white supremacists, NAZIs and KKK members. (and by alleged guilt by association, Libertarians, Conservatives, and Trump supporters.) After all, I disagree with the removal of statues of Robert E. Lee too. So that must make me a NAZI or a Klan member.
Fucking ridiculous.
If you are truly interested in "in depth" news, I recommend the following interview with Paul Craig Roberts.
Related
Fluid Law and how Uber Successfully Exploited It
The guy almost gets the story. One thing he misses, though, is how Uber, with its "Madison Avenue" strategy is able to exploit the natural, systemically inevitable, corruptibility of most politicians.
This whole Uber phenomenon would not have been successful at all, given that taxi regulations already exist, unless they could get the politicians on board, and convince them, or persuade them to pretend they actually believe, that Uber was not in the taxi business. Hence, Uber taxis are exempt from existing taxi regulations.
Most people would interpret this state of affairs as a tilting of the playing field, which it is.
The sleazebags at Hamilton's City Hall came up with the term, "New Licensing Category" in order to facilitate Uber's circumvention of the existing taxi bylaw.
"New Licensing Category" is nothing but a code word for tilting the playing field in favour of a politically sexy fad. In every-day taxi industry parlance, it is the equivalent of granting an unlimited number of taxi licenses to the Uber corporation, which of course, instantly devalues the lifetime investments of those poor suckers who made the error of investing their lives in the "Old Licensing Category." Both categories of licenses, obviously exist at the whim of trusted politicians.
This leads me to ask the question: How can anyone in today's world make any kind of plan for the future? People in the Hamilton taxi industry have spent decades in the business, have configured their lives and investment decisions around the City's taxicab regulatory system, only to discover that the political invention of a "New Licensing Category" has turned their lifetime efforts into worthless dust.
This is the price we all pay by putting too much power into the hands of government, and too much trust into the hands of those who gravitate to elected office.
The most important lesson here is not that Uber managed to cleverly provide a cheaper service by cutting corners on regulatory costs, but that they were allowed to get away with it.
Uber is a perfect lesson in political science.
More Uber News.
My vlog from January 2016
Monday, August 14, 2017
My Road Trip
I just got back from a whirlwind tour of Eastern Canada. I've never been that far east in Canada, so I figured I'd at least touch base on one or two provinces I've never been to.
Here's my report:
New Brunswick
Nice place, but why go there when you can have the same experience right here in Ontario. Oh, I forgot about the illusion at the magnetic hill in Moncton. Six bucks to sit in your car while it rolls backwards. Hardly worth the drive from Ontario.
Nova Scotia
People told me to make sure I visited the Cabot Trail. So I did the entire circuit. It's magnificent.
One thing I didn't like about the Cabot Trail was the price of smokes. $19.57 for a pack of Du Maurier. One does not need to know a thing about Nova Scotia politics other than the price of a pack of smokes. It shows the degree to which a government is committed to imposing non-diversity upon its inhabitants.
Quebec
The things that I like about Quebec are that they sell beer in the stores, and they take Canadian money at par. The fact that the road signs are all in French is very dangerous for people who don't speak French. It's also dangerous for the people who do speak French when they are T-boned by GPS-addled Anglophones. Is this French chauvinism really worth the price?
I did notice a few English signs though. Like the ones that said, "Restaurant."
I was in some town on the St. Lawrence looking for something to eat. Of course they had a McDonald's, but I am sick of that. Then I spotted this restaurant, called "Mike's." I derived a sense of comfort from that, so I went in.
There were a few people waiting to be seated so I got in line and picked up a menu.
The whole thing was in French. What was I supposed to do, just randomly pick an item and point to it?
But the decisive factor for me was not the incomprehensible menu. There was one item, I think it was "Manger de la marde et les Pomme de Brule avec Poisson." The description was about as comprehensible as the rest of the items on the menu, but what really turned me off was the price. $39 dollars or something. And you have to add tax and tip on top of that.
So I went to another place where there was one item I could understand. It was, "Pepperoni Pizza." I ordered that plus a Coke. It was pretty good but at $12 for a pizza smaller than a sidewalk pizza? Even at par that's pricey.
Overall
Without my usual access to the Internet, I was left with little more than fake news reports from Canadian corporate media and the CBC on the car radio. Prominent amongst the reports were stories about a bunch of white nationalists, KKK supporters, and Nazis going berserk in Charlottesville, Virginia. I couldn't wait to get home to check on my alternate media sources to find out what the real story was.
Friday, August 4, 2017
OMG! This is so Uberish.
As I read the article (see link below,) I could not help but recall the targeting, and eventual closure of Jaspal Gill's taxi fleet back in the fall of 2015, and the suspension of his taxi driver's license, on the grounds that his operation was not in compliance with City of Hamilton bylaws.
The message sent to Jaspal Gill was unambiguous. If you disregard the City of Hamilton's taxi regulations, you will be dealt with with the full force of the law. When it comes to taxicab regulation, the position of the City of Hamilton is zero tolerance for non-compliance.
Unless you are Uber.
The decision echoed the result of the attempts by Bruce Bergez to Uberize the optometry business.
Justice Watt, writing for the Court of Appeal, succinctly stated, "We cannot suffer the sacrifice of the rule of law to the lure of lucre."
Yep. That good ol' Rule of Law.
At around the same time as Mr. Gill's business was being decimated by the sincere devotees of the rule of law doctrine espoused by Justice Watt, the U.S. based taxi company, Uber, announced its intention to start operating a taxi service in Hamilton in total defiance of the existing laws.
The main difference between Mr. Bergez and Uber, it turned out, was the amount of lucre the respective parties were able to assemble in order to challenge the rule of law. Uber had billions of dollars behind it. The rule of law folded like a defective lawn chair. The lure of lucre prevailed. In Canada, the law could be purchased. Justice Watt's declaration ended up being exposed as pure wind.
Unlike Mr. Gill, who was severely dealt with by Hamilton's heroic politicians, Uber was not only given a pass on its 100% defiance of the taxi bylaws, the politicians scurried to invent a whole "new licensing category" that would give Uber's blatant disregard of the law an air of legitimacy. The effect of this "new licensing category" was not unlike a corporation initiating a stock split, only instead of issuing an equal number of certificates to the stock owners, the new certificates were given away to Uber for free. The market value of taxi owners licenses (stock certificates), predictably, tumbled from about $200 k, to an estimated $50 k, or less. Some stock split.
Most of the victims of this financial crime are too unsophisticated to understand what happened to their life-time investments. Some even believe the collapse was due to "market forces." Or, "disruptive technology." Anyone who even remotely grasps political economy knows this to be pure nonsense. The collapse in license values was 100% due to "political forces." The market had fuck all to do with it.
The rule of law, it turns out, has no more value than the word of a politician.
What Justice Watt should have said was,
Justice Watt, writing for the Court of Appeal, succinctly stated, "We cannot suffer the sacrifice of the rule of law to the lure of insufficient lucre."
The final outcome?
Uber Inc. will continue to harvest about 25% of the taxi market for deposit in its tax friendly Dutch banks.
The politicians will continue to collect their salaries, and probably get re-elected since the small minority of individuals they have sacrificed have no political power, nor public sympathy.
And the flood of new drivers into the taxi market will, predictably, drive incomes down to third world levels.
We now find ourselves in a situation where the City of Hamilton is flooded with taxi drivers, each vying for a piece of the passenger pie.
With statutory minimum wages set to rise in Ontario, this price barrier to employment will lead to even more thirsty camels being driven to the taxi driver watering hole in search of survival. Taxi driver wages will decline even further.
Finally, we have this report out of Singapore that makes Jaspal Gill's "crimes" of malfunctioning security cameras, and shifter cables secured with shoelaces, look like schoolyard pranks compared to Uber's clear preference for lucre over safety:
On another issue when it comes to the rule of law. What, exactly, is legal these days?
As the Uber phenomenon aptly demonstrates, the law has become oozingly fluid. Hillary continues to get away with a string of egregious crimes while the establishment swamp, more like cesspool, continues to dig for some pretense to remove the duly elected president of the United States.
Will the newly announced grand jury find something in Trump's history that was illegal? It's a mathematical certainty.
"In his new book, the Boston-based civil liberties advocate and occasional Reason contributor Harvey Silverglate estimates that in 2009, the average American commits about three federal felonies per day. And yet, we aren’t a nation of degenerates. On the contrary, most social indicators have been moving in a positive direction for a generation. Silverglate argues we're committing these crimes unwittingly. The federal criminal code has become so vast and open to interpretation, Silverglate argues, that a U.S. Attorney can find a way to charge just about anyone with violating federal law. In fact, it's nearly impossible for some business owners to comply with one federal regulation without violating another one. We're no longer governed by laws, we're governed by the whims of lawyers."
[Note: Just a little thing I wrote a few years ago in an attempt to expose the mendacity employed by busybody activists and opportunistic governments along with all of their rent seeking allies.
When I first posted this I realized that I was not 100% sure of my calculations since i was rather rusty on the chemistry so I invited readers to challenge my calculations. So far, no one has. 1 - (I know, I have no readers.)]
January 25, 2011.
Warning:
"Food contains arsenic. A rat poison."
Are Canadians Really as Stupid as their Government Thinks They Are
How long are they going to let their governments insult their intelligence?
According to the National Post, Health Canada is planning to change the warnings cigarette manufacturers put on their packaging.
One of the proposed new images shows a dead rat lying next to an ashtray with the tagline: "Cigarettes contain arsenic. A rat poison."
Well, Canadians.... so does food. According to The New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) which administers legislation covering food for sale in New Zealand and other things, "Most foods contain trace levels of arsenic."
"The lethal dose in humans is estimated to be approximately 50 to 300 mg (or 0.8
to 5 mg/kg-bw) of arsenic trioxide, although severe effects have been reported following ingestion of as little as 20 mg"
According to ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) New Zealand:
the arsenic content of US cigarettes as cited by the US Surgeon General in 1989 was still very high - 500-900 ng per g in processed tobacco, and 40-120 ng in mainstream smoke per cigarette; on these data, 10% to 17% of the arsenic appears in mainstream smoke.
If we assume each cigarette is 0.8 g tobacco then this is a ratio of 40 to 120 ng in smoke to 400-720 ng per cigarette, or a ratio of 10% to 17% going into mainstream smoke.
This means someone smoking a good tasting U.S. cigarette can get as much as 120 billionths of a gram of arsenic from one cigarette. The truly frightening part of all this is that if we use the lowest amount of arsenic reported to cause a severe acute effect from cigarette smoking (20 mg or 20 1/1000ths of a gram, a person would have to smoke, 166,667 good tasting American cigarettes (about 8,333 packs of twenty) with the highest levels of arsenic, very quickly to risk a severe reaction.
Isn't that scary? A pack a day smoker would therefore have to smoke the equivalent of 22.8 years of cigarettes all at once to experience the pleasure of a severe reaction.
At Health Canada's lowest lethal dose (50mg), our smoker would have to inhale 416,667 cigarettes in a very brief time to risk death... about 20,833 packs... or about 57 years worth of cigarettes for our pack a day smoker. Whew!
Furthermore, from the New Zealand Food Authority website,
Inorganic arsenic, formed from the combination of arsenic with oxygen, chlorine or sulphur, is more toxic and is known to add to the risk of people getting cancer if it is regularly consumed. However it is not usually found at high levels in food.
And...
the Joint Food and Agriculture FAO / WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) has set a provisional tolerable weekly intake (PTWI) of 15 micrograms / kilogram of bodyweight / week for inorganic arsenic.
So according to the FAO / WHO if we have a person who weighs 150 pounds or about 68 Kilograms, the provisional tolerable weekly intake would be 68 X 15 = 1,020 micrograms, or 1.020 milligrams which is equivalent to about 8,500 cigarettes (425 packs of twenty) per week.... a serious 60.7 pack a day habit. Talk about a chain smoker, this guy would have to light one up every 71.4 seconds for twenty four hours every day to reach the provisional tolerable weekly intake. If the guy expects to get any sleep then he will have to smoke even faster.
According to Health Canada again, the annual average level of arsenic in municipal treated groundwater in Quebec, for example, between 1990–2002 was 2.0 µg/L. Taking our provisional tolerable weekly intake for a 68 Kg person of 1,020 micrograms, a person in Quebec would have to drink about 1,020 µg / 2.0 µg/L = 510 Litres of water a week, about 73 litres per day to reach the threshold (vs only 425 packs of twenty cigarettes per week).
Interestingly, Health Canada suggests an average daily intake of 3.7 litres of water for Canadian males over the age of 19. In Quebec, 3.7 litres of water would, on average, be equivalent to about 3.7 X 2.0 µg of arsenic for a total daily intake of about 7.4 µg of arsenic or, about 7.4 µg X 1000ng/1µg X 1 cigarette / 120 ng = about 62 good tasting high arsenic American cigarettes per day.
If Health Canada intends to warn Canadians about the arsenic content of cigarettes why do they not also require warning labels on our kitchen faucets???
[January 25, 2011. Note: There are outright lies. And then there are half-truths. Outright lies are easy to dispel. Half truths are much more devious.
In case anyone doesn't quite understand what I am trying to say here.... (pardon me for assuming.)
I don't doubt the truth of the statement that cigarette smoke contains arsenic. But that is only the half of the truth. When you dig a little deeper and contextualize the fact, the outright mendacity of it all ought to smack you across the face.
To think that masses of sheeple, capable of grasping only the first half of the "truth," then go out and vote for the people who provide them with this "truth," are the ones who, ostensibly "rule," in a democracy, is enough to bring the blood of any thinking person to a boil. (And/or resist a trip to the medicine cabinet for some Gravol)
But I should not say thing like that. It's rhetoric that might lead some pinko loving anarcho-commie to go around slitting throats and shooting people....
Oh....
But I forgot.... it's not the anarcho-pinko, schizophrenic, leftist, commie, Glenn Beck hating, Cloward and Piven Mau lovers doing the killing...
It's us libertarians who believe in freedom, free trade and self self-ownership. (Yeah! We're the bad guys!)]
Monday, July 17, 2017
Line-Up Phobia
There is a new form of mental disorder that seems to be spreading rapidly.
Have you noticed it?
Go to a nearby Tim Horton's or MacDonald's, or similar venue and you have a good chance of seeing this disorder in practice.
The other day, when I went to pay for a couple of items at a local Dollarama, I observed another example of this phenomenon. A lady was standing at the checkout having her goods tallied. I was third in line. The second person in the line was standing about 16 feet away from the first person. If not for the fact that we were standing in a narrow aisle stocked with last-minute items, it would have been impossible to determine whether this person was actually in line, or just loitering.
In a saner time, I would have politely asked the woman in front of me if she was in line, and if not, would she kindly excuse me for walking around her. But these are not sane times.
I have to admit, I was annoyed by this behavior. Maybe it's a sign of age. Or maybe it's because I like things to make sense.
Someone standing 16 feet away from the first person in line makes absolutely no sense to me.
Anyway, while standing there observing this situation, I begin to roll the issue over in my mind.
Perhaps this is a new form of etiquette. The only problem I see with this is that, if the third person in the line were to be a practitioner of similar etiquette and, correspondingly provide an additional 16 feet, and the fourth person .... and so on, the fifth or so person observing this rule would be about 80 feet away from the cash register.... somewhere near the back of the store.
The bigger the store, the bigger the line.
Right away, I think you can probably see a potential problem with this new form of line etiquette: confusion.
The greater the gap between line-up members, the more difficult it will be to keep track of the order of service.
Picture this: You are at a supermarket, and you are in the laundry detergent and shampoo aisle nearest the back of the store. With some difficulty, you conclude that this is the end of the line. So you stand there, leaving 16 feet for the shopper in front of you. Of course, someone else could be doing exactly the same thing in the pop and snack-food aisle beside you. He can't see you and you can't see him.
Can you see how this could lead to confusion, or even conflict, if the two shoppers arrive at the check-out at the same time?
A while back I went to the Delta MacDonald's. I noticed there was only one person placing an order at the desk. There was also a group of people standing on the other side of the floor-space in front of the counter. In a saner age, this group would represent those customers who have already placed their orders and are now just waiting for their food.
I walked up and stood behind the first person in line. Out of nowhere, some guy comes up to me and says "excuse me, but I was in line ahead of you." Except that he wasn't, otherwise we would have been occupying the same space. His claim to be ahead of me was thus demonstrably false.
Having already observed repeated instances of this collapse in line-up protocol, I could not help but reply, "Well then, maybe next time you should try actually standing in the line." He gave me a look of stunned non-comprehension.
I have been on this planet for over sixty years now and I have to say, this is a fairly recent phenomenon. I am old enough to have experienced standing in many queues over the decades. Movies. Rock concerts. Grocery stores. Amusement parks. Airports. Taxi ranks.
This pointless space gap is a new thing. I've only been noticing it for about two or three years. It seems to be getting worse.
Some would say I have too much time on my hands if I spend it on line-up dynamics. Maybe that is true.
On the other hand, whenever I notice changes in human behavior, I can't help but think that such changes are not merely random, but are instead indicative of broader trends.
So I decided to Google the phenomenon. The best I could come up with was that some people are afraid to stand too close to other people as a result of "social anxiety disorder."
This explanation does not satisfy me. If the reason for leaving a large gap between person 1 and person 2 is due to person 2's aversion to standing too close to other people, then person 2 should be expected to experience similar discomfort from the person standing third in line, or directly behind them, unless that person also suffers from the same disorder, in which case, that person is standing back near the electronics aisle.
But if person 3 does NOT have the same disorder, then person 3 would end up standing uncomfortably close to person 2, in which case, it would be reasonable to expect person 2 to move forward in pursuit of relief. In my Dollarama example, therefore, the lady in front of me should have moved her buggy ahead by 8 feet, thus splitting the difference between the feared adjacent line-up participants.
But if she did move ahead by 8 feet, I would have followed behind her leaving the customary gap of about two feet between us. And then she would have moved up another 4 feet, and so on, until the check-out line began to resemble the check-out lines we have all grown to know and love.
Conclusion
The bizarre phenomenon of excessive line-up spaces is not explained by "Social Anxiety Disorder."
This topic deserves further exploration. It could be related to the excessive use of smart-phones and other accouterments of the Internet age. As people increasingly live their lives interacting with electronic devices, they become less engaged with the real world that surrounds them.
And in a world where all you need to do is tap an app to satisfy all of your social and consumer needs, the need for active participation in life is correspondingly diminished.
And in a world where active participation is becoming obsolete, the value of one's natural assets - arms, legs, eyes, ears, brain - depreciates.
Which means, maybe the reason why some people leave a 16 foot gap between themselves and the cash register is because they are just plain fucking stupid.
---
Gee. There doesn't seem to be much social anxiety disorder in Venezuela these days.
If successful, this technology can be adapted to all sorts of other government funded apps designed to control how we work, the information we consume, the politics we favor, the movies we watch, the music we listen to, the transportation we choose, and how many squares of toilet paper we use to wipe our asses.
Save the trees.
Wow! These guys were way off in their prediction that it would take until 6565 before you wouldn't need a husband or wife. And they sure never anticipated that it might come to a point where it would become common to inquire as to the gender of the spouse. Other than that, a brilliantly prophetic song.
Worth noting:
The core of McLuhan’s theory, and the key idea to start with in explaining him, is his definition of media as extensions of ourselves. McLuhan writes: “It is the persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed” (90) and, “Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex. Some of the principle extensions, together with some of their psychic and social consequences, are studied in this book” (4). From the premise that media, or technologies (McLuhan’s approach makes “media” and “technology” more or less synonymous terms), are extensions of some physical, social, psychological, or intellectual function of humans, flows all of McLuhan’s subsequent ideas. Thus, the wheel extends our feet, the phone extends our voice, television extends our eyes and ears, the computer extends our brain, and electronic media, in general, extend our central nervous system. [Source.]
