Eideard

A new poll suggests Canada may have reached the tipping point and a 66-per-cent majority favours legalizing marijuana…

The prohibition and a 40-year-long “War on Drugs” have led to pot being more widely accessible, taxpayers considerably poorer, gangs richer and thousands upon thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens branded “criminal.”

Another 50,000 or so Canadians are busted every year for possession; throw in 20,000 or so traffickers and producers and this so-called war is costing us as much as $400 million annually in law enforcement, court and corrections.

Bearing in mind a million dollars a year buys roughly 12 new cops, 14 teachers or public health nurses, ask yourself: Couldn’t all that money be better spent..?

Across the country today, more and more people agree.

Conducted Dec. 13 by Toronto-based Forum Research Inc. and released Tuesday, the latest poll…showed that residents of B.C. were the most likely to support pot-law reform, with 73 per cent wanting change.

Quebec had the lowest support for reforms at 61 per cent…

Who’s leading the way? Those aged 55 to 64.

The War on Drugs has been a useless waste of taxpayer dollars – in Canada, in the United States, in any nation that chose to waste their efforts supporting morality instead of simple science.

RTFA for a great deal of research and reference to other nations that have walked away from another unproductive war.

When I was an IT admin, I had the pleasure of dealing often with people who would submit urgent service requests and then leave for the day, leaving their office empty and computer locked by the time I could get there to help. Fortunately, I was often able to fix their problem while they weren’t there. Why? Their password was somewhere on their desk in one of these easy-to-find locations.

Under the Keyboard. This is a pretty common one, and one of the first places to look if you need to find someone’s password (or one of the first places to avoid if you need to jot down an often-used but difficult to remember password.) The worst offenders leave them on a post-it on their keyboard tray, or under the spot where their keyboard lives. Others attach the post-it to the underside of the keyboard, thinking it’s better hidden there. In both cases, it’s a sure bet that anything under the keyboard will have a password on it…

Under the Mouse Pad. This is another common hiding place for people who don’t want to put their passwords under their keyboard. They’ll usually slide a couple of sheets of paper under the mousepad with their usernames and passwords on it and refer to them when they forget, or update them when their password expires…

Under the Desk. One of the most disturbingly common spots many officer workers hide their passwords is one of the easiest to find: right under their desk surface. Just sit down at their desk and put your hand directly under the desktop, and you’ll often find yet another post-it note attached there. Most people who do this operate under the assumption that no one’s ever under their desk to see or notice such a thing—except the IT admin or help desk tech they call when they’ve jostled the Ethernet cable loose from the back of their desktop…

I haven’t even posted half of the silly places people think are secure in the world of prairie-dog cubicles. If you’re guilty of any of these, go apologize in advance to your network administrator. You may have compromised everything that should be secure. And if your password is “1-2-3-4-5″ – quit your job and go back to flipping burgers for a living.

So where should you store your passwords? RTFA for a couple of suggestions.

 
Chetan Baghat is India’s best-selling English-language novelist. According to Time magazine, one of the 100 most influential people in the world…His books deal with the lives, fears, aspiration and troubles of young Indians.

At the time I write this, millions of my countrymen are on the streets, fighting for a strong anti-corruption law. Many more are glued to their TV sets, watching developments as the initially defiant Indian government looks on track to eat humble pie.

This fight is led by Anna Hazare, a 74-year-old activist, who is on hunger strike until parliament considers the bill that would establish a Lokpal – ombudsman – with the power to investigate and punish corrupt politicians and civil servants.

Hazare had fasted in April and forced the government to agree to include his team in drafting the bill. His non-violent yet aggressive, Gandhi-like method of protest, together with his anti-corruption cause, struck a chord with Indians. Thousands of non-government organisations fight for social causes every day in India, but none has ever achieved this kind of support. From rickshaw drivers to software engineers, from businessmen to spiritual leaders, people from all walks of life back Anna. So do I…

Cynics thrive in India, and they have ample evidence to support their attitude. After all, things have not changed much over the past five decades – governance is as incompetent and corrupt as ever, and the guilty are almost never punished…

And yet, something is different about India’s class of 2011. Despite all the Uncle Cynics, people from all walks of life came forward to fight for the bill. From their parents’ generation that said “nothing will ever change”, they came forward to say: “I am the change…”

Though the government agreed to engage with Anna in April, it backtracked and insulted, ignored and snubbed his team during the drafting of the new legislation…In a serious lapse of judgment, the government arrested Anna from his home on the morning of 16 August. News spread, and the nation exploded on to the streets. By evening, the government wanted to release him. In a masterstroke, Anna refused to come out of jail, and continued his fast there. The country is in a frenzy, and the government is in a fix…

What has happened? How has a sleepy, defeatist India suddenly been galvanised into action? Why do our people, used to a feudal-colonial setup for centuries, suddenly want their politicians to be accountable, rather than treat them like kings? It is difficult to answer these questions at the moment, as we are still in the middle of the movement. However, a few things are clear: India seems to have suddenly woken up to an intense craving for the good and the honest.

Overdue.

Lots of normal people would pay $23 for a book. But $23.7 million (plus $3.99 shipping) for a scientific book about flies!?

This unthinkable sticker price for “The Making of a Fly” on Amazon.com was spotted on April 18 by Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and blogger.

The market-blind book listing was not the result of uncontrollable demand for Peter Lawrence’s “classic work in developmental biology,” Eisen writes. Instead, it appears it was sparked by a robot price war…

Eisen watched the robot price war from April 8 to 18 and calculated that two booksellers were automatically adjusting their prices against each other.

One equation kept setting the price of the first book at 1.27059 times the price of the second book, according to Eisen’s analysis, which is posted in detail on his blog.

The other equation automatically set its price at 0.9983 times the price of the other book. So the prices of the two books escalated in tandem into the millions, with the second book always selling for slightly less than the first.

The incident highlights a little-known fact about e-commerce sites such as Amazon: Often, people don’t create and update prices; computer algorithms do.

Individual booksellers on Amazon and other sites pay third-party companies for algorithm services that automatically update prices. Some of these computer programs purportedly work very well, getting sellers up to 60% more sales because they underbid the competition automatically and repeatedly…

“It’s pretty much like the stock exchange. What you see there is the prices changing all the time — but they never change drastically. Sometimes it’s a dollar here a dollar there — maybe $10. For a book, it probably would be pennies.”

Often producing as much useless “value” as many of the computer trades made for hedge funds and mutual funds. All you can hope for as a retail investor is to focus on what you calculate is the real value of equity over time – and let the rest of the market spin wheels in artificial endless loops.

Our stock markets will not do anything about it. I doubt Amazon will do anything about the same absurdity in their own mosh pit.

A $61.5 billion spending-cut bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday would slow economic growth significantly this year, according to an analysis by the global investment firm Goldman Sachs.

“Under the House passed spending bill, the drag on GDP growth from federal fiscal policy would increase by 1.5% to 2% in Q2 and Q3 compared with current law,” according to Alec Phillips, who signed the analysis…

“This nonpartisan study proves that the House Republicans’ proposal is a recipe for a double-dip recession,” said Senator Charles Schumer, a member of the Senate’s Democratic leadership.

Republicans in Congress, especially conservative Tea Party activists who were elected in November, have touted their fiscal 2011 spending-cut bill and upcoming attempts to impose more U.S. budget cuts as the key to improving the economy and creating jobs.

Which illustrates how out-of-touch with modern economics these clowns can be.

Democrats have countered that while there is a need to cut government spending and budget deficits over the long-term, policy-makers must tread softly in the short-term so the fragile economic recovery underway is not cut short…

With Democrats and Republicans facing a March 4 deadline to reach some sort of deal on funding the federal government, there are worries that a failure would lead to a temporary shutdown of many government offices and programs if there is no deal.

The Goldman Sachs analysis points out that a government shutdown “poses less risk” than proposed spending cuts “as long as it is brief…”

In its fiscal 2012 budget proposal released last week, the the Obama administration forecasted 2011 economic growth of 2.7 percent year over year, while Blue Chip economists estimate 3.1 percent.

Background disclaimer: I’ve been asked a few times to either include market analysis in this blog or offer a separate investing blog. I’ve paid little attention to investing other than studies in economics over my life. But, I got pissed-off enough at the shoddy management of what little I had set aside in mutual funds to begin studies and investing on my own in the downhill side of this Great Recession.

I think they’ve hit the nail smack on the head in this look at Republican reactionaries and their KoolAid Party class warfare allies. Reliance on 19th Century ideology versus essentials proven in practice from the days of Keynes up through Leontiev’s macroeconomic studies illustrates the irrelevance of what American conservatism has become. Or, rather, the irrelevance of those who claim to speak for conservatism – when their economic practices are closer to Mussolini’s corporatism than anything else.

One group of people who seem intent on being added to the list [of TV presenter bigots] are ‘Top Gear’ presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. It seems the trio are in the news on a monthly basis with some ignorant remark or another.

Last week Tweedledee, Tweedledum and The Other One insulted people from Mexico and Albania – an impressive feat to rile people from two countries in one week even by their standards. Here’s what they had to say about Mexican people:

Hammond: …Cars reflect national characteristics, don’t they, so German cars are very well built and ruthlessly efficient, Italian cars are a bit flamboyant and quick, a Mexican car’s just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight… leaning against a fence asleep, looking at a cactus, with a blanket with a hole in the middle as a coat.
May: It is interesting, isn’t it, because they can’t do food, the Mexicans, can they? Because it’s all like sick with cheese on it, I mean…
Hammond: Refried sick!
May: Yeah, refried sick.
Hammond: I’m sorry, but just imagine waking up and remembering you’re Mexican: ‘awww, no’.
Clarkson: No, it’d be brilliant… because you could just go straight back to sleep again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter users angered by the conviction of a man who threatened to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke showed support for him in their thousands today, thumbing their noses at the law by republishing the words that landed him in trouble.

Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant, yesterday lost his appeal against his conviction and £1,000 fine for a comment he made in jest when he was concerned that he might miss a flight to Belfast.

“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” he wrote in January.

Chambers was controversially prosecuted under a law aimed at nuisance calls – originally to protect “female telephonists at the Post Office” in the 1930s – rather than specific bomb hoax legislation, which requires stronger evidence of intent.

Civil liberties lawyers criticised his conviction, as did the Twitter community, which reacted with a vengeance to his failed appeal today.

Under the hashtag #IAmSpartacus – a reference to the film in which Spartacus’s fellow gladiators show their solidarity with him by each proclaiming “I am Spartacus” – thousands of people have copied Chambers’s original message.

As a result of the show of support for him, #IAmSpartacus was the most popular worldwide subject being referred to on Twitter at the time of this posting.

And I am repeating Chambers Tweet at my own Twitter site.

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!

An Ontario woman had to be rescued from the roof of her flooded car after a GPS system steered her astray into an isolated marsh. The incident happened Tuesday night in the Murray conservation area, northwest of Trenton, as the 25-year-old woman was driving to a friend’s home…

Officers from two OPP detachments and local firefighters had trouble locating the motorist, who had used her cellphone to call 911, in the large, remote area.

The dispatcher kept her on the phone and asked her to honk her horn to help direct rescuers, said Chief John Whelan of the Quinte West Fire Department. Firefighters dressed in floatation immersion suits used all-terrain vehicles to reach the woman, whose newer-model Mazda was stuck in waist-deep water.

She was checked by waiting paramedics, but was uninjured. “She was just wet and cold and scared,” Chief Whelan said.

The woman had followed a narrow trail into the middle of the swampy marsh when her car slid off the roadway and began filling with water shortly before 9:45 p.m., he said. She was about a kilometre off the main road.

There still is no patch for stupidity.

Not to say I’m not capable of something equally silly. I remember one time on a mountain just across the valley from the Eiger…

Cripes! Looks like Beavis…

Pregnant women are deluged with advice about things to avoid: caffeine, paint, soft cheese, sushi. Even when evidence of possible harm is weak or purely theoretical, the overriding caveat is, “Don’t take it, don’t use it, don’t do it…”

The dangers of this mentality became frighteningly apparent this summer, when a study in The Lancet reported strikingly high rates of death and of complications like pneumonia in pregnant women with H1N1 influenza. Pregnancy meant a fourfold risk of hospitalization, sometimes with a tragic outcome; all the pregnant women who died had been relatively healthy to begin with.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have since put pregnant women at the top of the priority list for the vaccine, and have recommended that pregnant women start antiviral medications as soon as possible after exposure to the virus and after the onset of flu symptoms…

And despite recommendations that antiviral drugs be started as soon as flu symptoms appear, many pregnant women in the Lancet study were not treated soon enough. Delays ranged from 6 to 15 days from the time that symptoms started, and 2 to 14 days from the time the women were seen by a doctor. Not one of the six pregnant and relatively healthy women who died received medication within 48 hours of the onset of her illness.

This is a sadly familiar pattern. After the thalidomide disaster of 1960s, and the very real concerns it raised about the impact of drugs on fetal development, many ended up viewing the use of any medicine by pregnant women as anathema. As a result, doctors and women alike often eschew or discontinue medications for serious illnesses, even when the harms of untreated disease, for women and the children they bear, are worse than any risks of medication.

Sadly,there are those friends of mine I refer to as the Vegetarian Left who oppose any medical treatment beyond the capabilities of the average Cro Magnon Shaman – or even worse, the Libertarian loonies who feel recommending vaccination is just another aspect of state control over their lives.

Don’t malign our American Taliban for their anti-science beliefs when you’re halfway there on your own.