Kvetching Turds

“‘You’re a criminal serving time in prison – you should not be getting an HST bribe cheque,’ Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak said Friday.”

But

“Mail call will be welcomed by those inmates serving less than 90 days in provincial correctional facilities, as they are the only convicts eligible for the payments.”

Ok. That seems fine. Tax adjustments shouldn’t apply to inmates? So if an inmate has an income while in prison, and tax rates are increased for his tax bracket, he shouldn’t pay the increased rate?

I’m not that dense, I realize that considering the cheque literally as a bribe means why let criminal offenders benefit from a bribe, but of course it’s not actually a bribe. It’s a bit of money to say “Look, prices won’t come down overnight after businesses start seeing the benefits of HST, so in the meantime here’s a bit of cash to smooth things out.” People in prison for less than 90 days will certainly need that sort of help. And that’s fine.

No no, I highly doubt that anyone purchased 1500 kg of ammonium nitrate. You see, we’ve spent A BILLION DOLLARS on security, so it’s just not possible, you see.

What if someone jumps into the fake lake? I’m sure money has been set aside for that lawsuit. A BILLION DOLLARS!

Every single paragraph in this article explaining Giorgio Mammoliti’s transit proposals contains a horrible idea.

It’s this kind of stuff that scares people who know anything about economics away from the party: “No one believes that businesses will pass on their savings to consumers. If the government’s own business—the LCBO—isn’t going to pass on the savings, why should those in the private sector?” said [NDP leader] Horwath.

It’s not a matter of why should they as in why would they feel any moral compunction to do so, but a matter of that’s just how competition works. Unless you have mass price fixing, eventually someone says “Hey, it’s costing me a bit less to produce my crap, so I’m going to lower my costs a bit to beat out my competition,” and then the competition does the same thing and so on and so forth until prices come down.

“Liberals are calling on the Harper government to honour a motion passed in the House today to provide specific details of the $1-billion G8/G20 security boondoggle,” according to a party release.

I think in grade five we had a current events folder where you were supposed to be able to notice bias. “Boondoggle” is one of those words.

Everybody is horrible.

In my post a moment ago I mentioned a stupid graph.

I just came across it here.

Copied here:

(Without having a link to a specific instance, what I was talking about is the kind of crap nobody likes to see the other side doing, just restating the party line.)

Southen neighbour Steve Benen reports that conservatives in his country are happy that the health care system in our country has problems. It validates their criticisms of their recently passed health care bill, they believe.

Benen notes, “the new health care law in the United States creates a system that isn’t similar to the Canadian system at all, so condemning the Affordable Care Act by pointing to Canadian budget problems doesn’t make sense.”

Yes. But even if it is similar, it’s still better than no system at all.

Yes. But even the underlying premise that something that needs work is something that shouldn’t exist, is completely stupid. When brakes go in a car, you get new brakes, you don’t say “Ha! Told you cars were a bad idea!” Because you’d sound like an idiot. Because you would, in fact, be an idiot. Conservatives are idiots.

So the combined spending for the G8 and G20 events dwarf the spending of other large but in no way obviously directly comparable events.

Comparing the G8 and G20 to another G8 doesn’t make any sense.

If the 2002 G8 was $190 million, and the G20 is equal to the G8*20/8, then the combined expense would be expected to be $665 million. Which is a stupid calculation. But that’s what you get when you start with a stupid comparison.

I’m not saying the spending isn’t ridiculous, I’m just saying poor comparisons are no way to support that ridiculousness.

Obviously it’s kind of a thing to talk about now, leaving Facebook, or at least how begrudgingly you’re staying on Facebook.

And then today, this in my “Updates:” “In the future, all notifications of proposed changes will come through the Facebook Site Governance Page. To receive future updates to Facebook’s site governance documents, become a fan of the Page.”

They’re sticking it to me. I’m going to have to have everybody see me “Likes Facebook Site Governance” if in the future I want to know in what ways my privacy is being violated.

Horrible.

He’s going to create 250,000 jobs. Vote for me instead and I’ll create ONE MILLION JOBS!

While we’re just picking numbers out of hats.

I’m thinking at least half of Rossi’s jobs have to be imaginary. That is, they’ll exist in his mind, but nobody will be doing them.

First off, I’m not sure where 9.6% comes from, but that’s fine. That may be the number for the actual city of Toronto. But then there aren’t 250,000 people looking for work in actual Toronto.

The article notes that “Rossi did not explain the formula he used . . . to come up with the 250,000 figure.”

OPTION ONE
Take population of Toronto (somewhere a bit over 2,500,000), multiply by apparent unemployment rate (9.6%), round up, equals 250,000. Which is patently ridiculous (a. it’s impossible to create a job for every single unemployed person, b. there aren’t actually 250,000 unemployed people in Toronto because at any given time about a third of the population (kids, retired people, the hopeless) aren’t looking for jobs). Therefore, Rocco Rossi is ridiculous.

Unless… OPTION TWO
Forget about just Toronto. Consider the Toronto CMA. This includes Ajax, Aurora, Bradford West Gwillimbury, Brampton, Caledon, East Gwillimbury, Georgina, Halton Hills, King, Markham, Milton, Mississauga, Mono, New Tecumseth, Newmarket, Oakville, Orangeville, Pickering, Richmond Hill, Toronto, Uxbridge, Vaughan, Whitchurch-Stouffville. (NB: Most of these places are not voting for the mayor of Toronto.) Here there are a shade over 300,000 people looking for work. Create a job for 80% of them, equals 250,000. Of course, this would reduce the unemployment rate to about 2%. Which is economically impossible. Therefore, Rocco Rossi is ridiculous.

Unless… OPTION THREE
What he’s really thinking is that his policies will create jobs throughout all of Ontario. In this case there are say, generously, 650,000 people looking for work. Figure you can make jobs for about 40% of them, equals 250,000. Of course, this would reduce the provincial unemployment rate to 5.5%. Which would be well below where it’s ever been before. Therefore, Rocco Rossi is ridiculous.

CONCLUSION
Rocco Rossi is ridiculous.

No matter what they say, MPs have to sound ridiculous when trying to defend their unwillingness to be held accountable.

So let’s call that “baseline stupid.” Anything other than “Sure, here are the records” is going to be at least baseline stupid. And then there’s the next level:

“She is an employee of the house,” Liberal MP Scott Andrews said. “We appoint her. So why would she audit the people who appoint her?”

Oh god.

I’m getting the sense that nothing’s going to work to stop the oil leak. I also get the sense that this is known. But when you know there’s nothing you can do, you still have to try something. It looks a lot better to say “Look, we’re trying all of these never-before-tried and generally unstudied ideas” then to just sit back and say “It has to stop eventually.” But when is that? I haven’t seen a date.

I didn’t read this whole post, because it’s way too long without saying somewhere near the top “Sorry, this is really long.”

The thing with music theft is people keep making it anyhow. The argument for strong intellectual property rights is primarily that without those rights people wouldn’t bother to innovate/invent/produce. And that’s probably true, generally. I don’t imagine Pfizer saying “That’s fine, even though everything we make is stolen we’ll continue investing billions in medical research.” But that’s apparently exactly what happens with music.

It’s not that “musicians in particular should be giving their music away for no cost” (emphasis mine), it’s that they do. Not intentionally of course (well, not usually), but they know while making music that it will be stolen in large quantities. Yet they keep doing it.

That said, what I personally support is something like an “Artistic Freedom Voucher.” Or full paper here.

There’s lots of “This year we’ll spend this,” or “This month so many soldiers were killed,” or “Today this many civilians were blown up,” but it’s hard to keep tabs on the totals.

Well, they’re here. And they’re very big numbers.

So the federal government isn’t going to fund Pride. The justification for it is that there are other events that need funding too, and Pride can support itself. That actually sounds reasonable, and it’s the most politically pragmatic reason/excuse you can give, since as much as people want funding for their own events it’s hard to say “And to get it you should take it away from that event.” But in this case, that can’t be seen as valid.

Last year Diane Ablonczy had responsibility for this sort of funding removed after supporting Pride. This removal immediately on the heels of announcing Pride funding was too unlikely to be a coincidence, meaning this was obviously a political issue for the Conservatives. They didn’t want to alienate their social conservatives supporters, and it’s easy to alienate such people when they see people not like them receiving $400,000.

If there had been no such issue last year, this year’s rationale may have to fall into the “Well, fine, I guess that’s reasonable enough” category. But given that this is obviously an issue for the Conservatives, this year’s rationale instead falls into the “bullshit” category. This is simply a governing reactionary party’s abuse of a minority group.

From the Star article:

“Last year, Clement said the lion’s share of the marquee program’s funding went to large urban centres, particularly Toronto and Montreal. This year, the major cities were limited to two successful applications, allowing the government to spread the largesse around to smaller centres across the country.”

A dollar spent attracting someone to Toronto or Montreal is going to do a lot more than a dollar spent trying to get someone to visit some small town (I don’t want to pick anywhere specific). Toronto and Montreal are cities people look for a reason to visit. People already know they can go to those cities for world class theatre, galleries, restaurants, sporting events, night clubs, concerts, whatever. So they wait until they think “Hey, why don’t we go for [Pride, Luminato, etc.].” That’s the axis around which their trip will orbit, but it’s far from where they’ll spend all their time. In hypothetical small town, that doesn’t exist.

So this is fraud on a pretty large scale with a huge scope. That said, I’d like some more details. Did these people stop paying their mortgages? Presumably. The straw buyers and fake income documents are certainly fraudulent, but it seems a big part of what made this work was the bank doing a lazy job of valuing houses. That part’s not fraud.

This will become more (or less) interesting once there are more details. Are the straw buyers stuck with mortgages they can’t pay? Were they willing accomplices or coerced? Who knows.

I should have started this post with a quick summary of what the fraud actually is, but I’m tired right now.

Case in point.

This post at Impolitical links to a Toronto Star online poll showing overwhelming public support for Sheila Fraser to have access to MP’s receipts. In this case I’m willing to believe the online poll results. The post ends up wondering, “Why no party is grabbing this issue for advantage… is a mystery.”

It’s no mystery. Even someone with only “legitimate” expenses is going to have something that they’d be forced to apologize for if someone else decided to make an issue of it. Then there’s all the illegitimate expenses. Nobody would come out of this looking good. Even if there are a few scattered individuals who could make it through an examination, within each party there will be at least a few bad spenders who make the entire party look bad. Frankly it would probably undermine confidence in our entire political representation. You could argue that so will not giving them up in the first place, but that’s not true, people forget things quickly.

For the record I’m for MPs having to give up their receipts to the auditor general, and think it’s horrible that they’re not. I’m just saying it’s no surprise.

I understand the political reasons for promoting it, but I’m less sure why we should subsidize rural broadband access. If it is important (and I’m willing to believe it might be), I’d think a stick would be better than a carrot for realizing that goal. Instead of subsidizing the infrastructure, just fine internet providers who don’t offer some measurable amount of rural broadband service. I don’t know what the actual policy would look like, I’m just saying.

I agree with pretty much everything here, and mainly I’m glad I didn’t have to create something like that for my paycheque, to dwell on the turditude of Lost.

The show still has a few episodes left to be awesome, but it seems unlikely. Basically, there was a whole bunch of crap that we could never understand. (Not including how the characters never, ever ask each other the natural follow-up questions any human would, especially while trudging through the forest for hours on end–but I’m willing to grant concessions like that.) So when being shown the ghost in the machine we can (if it’s awesome enough) be blown away or (if it’s perfectly senseless or mundane) be disappointed. So far it’s the disappointment.

“But that’s the point!” No it isn’t. That’s stupid.

UPDATE: I think I’m wrong to say “is getting really stupid.” Because of how mysterious everything is, we just never knew for sure whether it was stupid. So it’s not that it’s getting stupid, it’s that its stupidity is being confirmed.