Double Blind

When I posted earlier about the Pattullo bridge situation, Raven took exception to my argument against photo radar. I’ll dissect it here.

If it’s not wrong to have the cops selectively ticketing speeders, how can it be wrong to ticket the clowns that speed on roads they clearly aren’t very familiar with?

I never said this in my previous post – my fundamental argument is that speeding is used as a proxy for bad driving, but this proxy is only used because it can be objectively measured, while bad driving cannot. The traditional method of cops hiding on a side street nabbing people off the Knight Street bridge or any other famous area where people tend to go 20km/h over the speed limit is not only useless, but it is highly unethical.

The fundamental problem is that bad driving (or alcohol/drugs) cause accidents and not speed. It just so happens that a lot of these people that are bad drivers or drunk tend to speed when they crash into people. Police would have a very difficult time in court justifying why they pulled over and ticketed a person for bad driving unless if it was very blatant (e.g. crossing the yellow line in urban traffic), but catching idiots that don’t blink when changing lanes is very difficult to do. Finding speeders guilty in court, however, is much easier – just show that the recorded speed in the radar gun is above the calibrated error bars of the gun and you’ve got a conviction.

Photo radar is just as useless for this reason – you’ll get rid of speeding in the 50 meter stretch that the radar van is active, but photo radar does nothing to remove bad drivers off the road, including ones that are more likely to crash on the Pattullo Bridge.

Speed cameras on all the overhead lights, plus a giant sign saying ‘Photo Radar In Effect: You will be ticketed if you exceed 60km/hour’ (or whatever the real limit is) would completely eliminate the problem of idiots speeding through the “nasty curve on the eastern side”.

Why not extend this logic to the entire road network? The answer should be fairly obvious. Since we are utterly incapable of driving on our own without committing the crime of speeding, we should just ban all automobile traffic and be forced to use Translink. At a minimum, all of our cars that enter into an urban zone should be reconfigured to go at a maximum speed of 60km/h, lest we speed over this limit.

For the public record, the last paragraph was sarcastic. It doesn’t show well over the internet.

The webhostess of Countably Infinite has a post about H5N1 that she wrote a couple weeks ago. Being actively involved in the Bird Flu market (whether H5N1 will be confirmed in the USA), I tend to take an interest. In addition to Karen’s observations, I have some of my own.

First, the standard product that people are stockpiling is Tamiflu, which is manufactured by Roche. This product was originally licensed from Gilead Sciences, which is something I invested in many years back (they have now since established a dominating position with an anti-HIV therapeutic called Viread and are less concerned about the flu market). Unfortunately, I don’t believe Tamiflu will have much of an effect if a form of H5N1 mutated into an easily transmissible human strain. Tamiflu was investigated for preventative purposes and its effect is marginal at best. For H5N1, it would be utterly useless in suppressing an outbreak.

Second, people have been working with poultry for the last few millennia and this shouldn’t be the first time that there has been avian-human transmission of certain viruses. While I don’t think people should be cavalier about it, I think the media hype on this particular event is outlandish. If you look at the history of media reporting, especially on SARS and mad cow disease, it is very easy to see the sensationalism of these particular outbreaks when in reality it’s very small.

Yes, it would suck to be a bird with the flu, but thankfully that’s unlikely to spread to humans in a massive “outbreak” anytime soon.

My best guess is that the next biological plague to affect humanity will be about as insidious as HIV/AIDS was when it was “discovered” in the early 80′s. It will be unknown and cause hysteria equal to HIV. Remember the days when it wasn’t even known whether touching a toilet seat or shaking a hand would be sufficient to cause HIV transmission?

I analyzed this in the last federal budget, but it’s worth thinking about for those that are in the lower tax bracket (or are planning to be in the lower tax bracket) – taxes on dividends received from Canadian corporations are slightly negative. This was an indirect result of the Conservatives tinkering with the dividend tax credit on the last Federal budget. So if you earn less than $33,755 (in BC) in the 2006 tax year, every dollar of dividend income you earn will result in a tax savings of 4.06 cents. This is -5.44% federally and +1.38% provincially, which leads to a combined tax rate of -4.06%.

As an example, say you own some shares of the Bank of Montreal and they declare a dividend. If your share of the dividend is $1,000, you would be able to deduct $40.60 from your tax bill as a result.

This will create some very perverse incentives for lower income people to capture dividends from companies about to go ex-dividend, as effectively the government would be paying you to receive it. When you flip the shares the day after, you can just book the capital loss and deduct that from previous or future capital gains. The only hitch would be transaction expenses.

I also think it is inevitable that the government will legislate this quirk away by the next budget.

I am currently at the Air Canada Lounge waiting for a trip out to LAX. This is the first trip I have taken by plane after the big terrorist scare in London. I am very happy to report that there is seemingly no chances in security procedures (i.e. nothing to delay what is already a fairly stupid process). However, the one change I can detect is the following:

At the airport lounge, there are two refrigerators. One carries soft drinks (pepsi, juices, etc.) while the other carries alcoholic beverages (beer and wine). The fridges are locked! You have to get an attendant to open up the fridge, and get them to pour you a glass of whatever and then they will put the remainder of the drink back in the fridge again (and then lock the fridge). You can carry the glass carrying the beverage you wanted wherever you want in the lounge (the area in the transborder lounge is very spacious and in case if you were a terrorist, nobody would see you pouring that liquid into a container).

I can’t believe what I am seeing. To make matters more interesting, they are serving a nice clam chowder (New England style, not the Manhattan crap) which is a nice thick consistency. They allow you to serve yourself this soup in a nice ceramic bowl. What distinguishes soda in a can versus soup in a bowl? Apparently the ability to take the can somewhere, while terrorists couldn’t be smart enough to put a cap on a glass and take it with them on board.

This is so pathetic I can’t even write anymore to describe how stupid the state of aviation security has become. Have we as a society become so risk intolerant that we can’t even drink pop out of a can anymore? How is this endangering a flight when there are six thousand other methods that terrorists can use to bring liquids on board?

Ultimately terrorists are to blame for this, but a close second comes governments and airport authorities that allow this stupidity to continue.

In any classic case, there are two causes of resource shortages: not enough supply, and too much demand.

Right now, they ran out of water reserves and are forced to take drastic water conservation measures. Normally, they would have expected some rainfall which would have replenished their reserves, but this has been a relatively dry year (blame “climate change”) and the town has nearly been sucked dry.

I can’t comment about the demand measures – apparently resorts are the primary consumers of water in the town, and the municipality has failed to keep those consumers of water in check. The other measure, supply, was defeated 70/30 by the town’s residents in a 2004 referendum to expand the water supply. The irony is that apparently the reason is that town residents rejected the proposal to prevent further tourism development.

So ultimately, the town got what it deserved, a water shortage. I just laugh at residents saying that they’ll kick out the mayor when it was their referendum decision in 2004 that ultimately led up to today’s event.

This almost reminds me of the massive BC interior forest fires back in 2003 which nearly wiped a few small towns off the map in the Kamloops area – it was those towns that previously rejected the idea of performing some preventative maintenance on the forest by initiating fires. The complaint was that they didn’t want the air to smell and burning forests was a “bad thing” which went “against nature”. Ultimately when you don’t ignite the fuel that accumulates on the floor of a forest, you get exactly what you saw in 2003, namely raging infernos. Residents of the interior presumably learned their lesson the hard way; it appears that the people in Tofino have done the same.

I wonder if residents of Tofino would be so reluctant to expand the water supply capacity this time around, or whether they’re going to continue to shoot the messenger (the Mayor) while failing to solve their problems.