I don’t know how scientific this is, but I just added the rss feeds to my reader for the Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, and Greens, and within Google Reader the “subscribers” look like this:

Liberals 39
Conservatives 37
NDP 43
Greens 13
(And the Bloc has 12)

First thing, those all seem strangely low. Either nobody reads anything these parties have to say, or Canadians (the primary target audience, I assume) aren’t that likely to use Google Reader.

Second thing, it’s interesting how those figures generally correspond with the latest EKOS poll which looks like this:

Liberals 29
Conservatives 31
NDP 15.5
Greens 11.3
(And the Bloc has 10.3)

Combining those figures (all as percentages out of 100) yields this (rss/poll):

Liberals 27.1/29.9
Conservatives 25.7/31.9
NDP 29.9/16
Greens 9/11.6
(Bloc 8.3/10.6)

What I’m taking away from that is not that the NDP have a serious chance of leading the next government. What I’m taking away is that the Green Party’s reach and grassroots support may be overstated at this point. They have fewer “I’m seriously into this” supporters than one might have thought, and more “Fuck everybody else” supporters.

Again, to emphasize (with emphasis), I don’t know how scientific this is.

Although I suck at updating this turd of a blog, I feel like it’s important that within 24 hours of our neighbour’s passing “historic” legislation I acknowledge that here, even though this forum is currently less public than if I were to shout out my window into a hobo lot.

I hope Obama is well-protected these next couple days. It’s hard to underestimate the number of nutcases running around. (Whenever one of these crazy people really does something completely insane, I will (do) blame the media. In part.)

I think (hope) that comment (the first two sentences) is less a statement of serious concern, and more a meta-statement on how concerning the concern over the concern of fearful morons is.

So the throne speech includes this: “Canadians live within their means and expect their governments to do the same.”

That sounds familiar: “But families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.” Obama said that not too long ago.

In both cases the remarks are vague enough to be both true and disconcerting.

The throne speech comment is followed immediately with “Spending designed for a rainy day should not become an all-weather practice.” Again, vague enough to be both true and disconcerting.

Spending isn’t necessarily bad. Spending more than you make isn’t necessarily bad either. So long as the spending is useful.

Also, I don’t know about the rest of the country, but there’s clearly a housing bubble in Toronto. You can rent for well below the cost of owning. Maybe this is a demographic thing with too many 20- and 30-somethings buying a house just because it’s what you’re supposed to do? I don’t know, it’s a hypothesis I’m not going to examine right now. Or a rush ahead of the increased restrictions? Are there readily available data on the types of mortgages being taken out? When everything crashes, the next mayor’s going to be fucked.

Ok. Final figures. Final changes.

First is a weighted ranking. For this, a bronze medal is worth one point, a silver is worth two points, and a gold four. You can tweak this however, but that’s the ranking I settled on, the feeling being that a the difference in value between a gold medal and a silver should be worth at least as much as the difference in value between a silver and a bronze.

Second is a ranking showing an average rank of how well a country performed (on an unweighted basis by medal) based on how populous the country, and by how productive the country (using GDP). (click to see full image)

Third is a ranking showing the same as the above (an average rank of how well a country performed based on how populous the country, and by how productive the country (using GDP)) using gold medals only.(click to see full image)