Double Blind

Right this minute (10:30am) I was supposed to be on my way to Manning Park for the long weekend (so don’t expect any posts after this for a few days) but apparently some truck caught on fire on Highway 1 just east of 232 St. I am waiting for a few friends to come east but they are caught up in traffic. Apparently because of this, traffic is gummed up all the way to Mt. Lehman Road.

So I am listening to the 730AM traffic channel (which I think is a brilliant service for route planning) and hear that police are monitoring around the Whatcom Road exit for speeders!

I would just like to take this point to comment that catching people speeding on the freeway is an absolutely useless activity – especially on Canada Day weekend when the priority is to get the traffic off the roads, and not to keep it on the roads by enforcing our artificially low speed limits. Why are we spending valuable police resources on an activity (making sure people don’t go over 110km/h in a 100km/h zone) that will have zero future preventative power?

I’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with police forces across the province making money every time fines are collected from tickets and everything to do with public safety.

Have a good long weekend. I’ll be around here somewhere.

So when I get back from holidays, I notice the following vandalism on the deck:

You’re probably wondering what the flower pots are doing on top of the white buckets – this was to keep the squirrels out of the pots. Unfortunately, one managed to tip over – I don’t know whether it was the wind or whether it was squirrels that actually did it.

Also, the reason why an old CD-R is inside the flower pot is because birds don’t like the reflective surfaces for some funny reason.

I won’t say too much about the trip other than that the weather co-operated and it was an excellent get-away from reality for a few days. I’ll attach a few pictures of interest on the trip – you may note the theme of animals and nature, which is usually what I try to see when I do travel.

People that have been around the Island should be able to guess four distinct locations in these pictures.

A couple weeks ago I noticed that BC Ferries offers discounted fares on certain routes at certain times. The last time I checked, they usually give discounted fares at greatly non-peak times (e.g. 5:15am on the Duke Point route).

Now I checked it and the Tsawwassen to Duke Point (Nanaimo) discount is applicable for all day.

The savings are significant – instead of paying $69 one-way for a car and two passengers, the price is $30. I don’t think ferry prices were that cheap 10 years ago when oil was trading at $15 a barrel.

Guess where I’m going for a short holiday? I’ve got to put some more CO2 in the atmosphere before the carbon tax kicks in on July 1st.

I always enjoy my time on the island. Life there is a lot more slower, even in the middle of Victoria where the danger is not crashing into the rear ends of cars going 40km/h in a 50km/h zone.

Posting will be non-existent until at least Sunday!

I subscribe to a bunch of information feeds from the Ministry of Finance – the Fiscal Monitor, in particular, is quite an interesting two minute read every month.

Since they don’t have RSS feeds, I subscribe to their mailing list and get informed every time a new document gets published.

Yesterday, I receive this email from the mailing list (note that “Yesterday” means June 17, 2008):

April 21st, 2008

Note to Subscribers to Finance Canada’s E-Mail Alert

Two documents will no longer be published (Economy in Brief; Government of Canada Securities) and have been deleted from the subscription form.

Other categories have been added (Canada at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD); Canada at the IMF and World Bank (Bretton Woods); Legislative Proposals, Notice of Ways and Means Motions and Explanatory Notes; Management of Canada’s Official International Reserves Report; Sustainable Development Strategy).

If you do re-subscribe, and wish to continue receiving your previous selections as well as new ones, you will need to re-select all of your available previous choices. That’s because the new selections overwrite the previous ones.

You can re-subscribe here in English: http://www.fin.gc.ca/scripts/register_e.asp .

You can re-subscribe here in French: http://www.fin.gc.ca/scripts/register_f.asp.

I will list what’s wrong with this:

I appreciate that the government is running a service on their own volition to inform us of new publications, but you really have to wonder about some of these people that are running our country. The Canadian Ministry of Finance is unusually competent (at least over the past 15 years); except when it comes to managing their mailing list servers, I guess.

The only purpose of job interviews is to tell whether the candidate you have in the door is a complete whack-o. Otherwise its screening capability is pretty much limited.

This guide to answering the 23 most common interview questions is a good read.

I’m amazed that large corporations do this sort of interviewing still when all they’re doing is selecting candidates that are well rehearsed in answering these very same questions. It reminds me in education that students are good at writing examinations, not necessarily knowing the subject material.

Getting accused of having child pornography on your computer is the second worst offence to be accused of – the first being sexual abuse of children.

In one particular person’s case, he was working for the Department of Industrial Accidents (DIA) in the state of Massachusetts – they gave him a laptop and when they discovered that his network usage was four times the average, they investigated his computer and discovered child pornography on it.

The only problem is that forensic investigations later revealed that he had nothing to do with it – the computer was previously compromised.

Still, the damage was done. The DIA fired him, and basically he had to live a year under the stigma of being accused of having child pornography despite being completely innocent.

I am amazed this sort of situation doesn’t happen more often – it is quite easy for hackers to compromise a computer unless if the operator knows exactly how to keep it secure. Most people don’t.

I notice that the Canadian government’s Weather Office has a link to the Mars probe and gives Martian weather reports!

Right now you can see that it’s sunny, highs of -26 degrees and lows of -82 degrees (gets rather cold when you’re not facing the sun).

One advantage of having an atmosphere full of water vapour is that it retains heat a lot better than the thin Martian atmosphere. Unfortunately, the mass of water (18 atomic units) is too light for the Martian gravity to properly retain. CO2, however, has an atomic mass of 44, which is why Mars has been able to retain a thin CO2 atmosphere.

If Mars were to spontaneously have an Earth-like atmosphere, it is likely the planet would be habitable.

The expected collection from personal income tax, corporate income tax and the 7% PST in the 2008-2009 fiscal year is projected to be about $13.4 billion.

The carbon tax, as enacted on July 1, is projected to bring in annually $450 million ($338 million for 9 months).

So let’s pretend the government said “to the heck with it” and decided to put on a carbon tax that is 30 times greater than what is going to happen on July 1 and simultaneously got rid of all income and sales taxes in the province, along with the bureaucracy associated with the departments.

Such a carbon tax would be equivalent to roughly 72 cents per litre – so you would see about $2.25/litre gasoline prices.

There are two very easy flaws in this model. One is that there would be increases in ways to evade carbon taxes (e.g. cross-border shopping, or even cross-provincial shopping), but only a small quantity would be avoidable. The second flaw is that consumption of carbon-related resources would drop significantly, to the point where it would not be able to generate the desired $13.4 billion. But the effects of such a radical policy change would be fascinating to study in a lab, if only it were possible.

I highly suspect that the existing carbon tax will not achieve the projected $338 million in budgeted revenues simply due to the increase in crude oil costs over the past 4 months. This was a point I had made earlier – in order to keep the “revenue neutral” aspect of the carbon tax, the tax itself will need to increase as consumption declines.

In addition, there are unlikely to be any “organic” tax cuts other than tax reductions performed in the name of carbon taxation.

Lately I’ve noticed that the supermarket has been selling 5 pound bags of grapefruit for relatively cheap (roughly $3 to $3.50).

The first bag I picked up was a couple months ago – it was a bag of ocean spray ruby red pink grapefruit. I really loved eating them – they were nice and sweet, not too acidic and a pleasure to eat. I bought another bag after I finished eating them.

A couple weeks ago I looked at the produce isle and noticed another bag of grapefruit, but didn’t notice the subtle variation – this one was “pink grapefruit” and not ruby red. The difference is that the flesh is not as sweet, although it is easier to extract from the grapefruit.

Still, I prefer ruby red grapefruit over pink grapefruit. It’ll probably be enough to dissuade me from purchasing pink grapefruit until the red ones come back in bulk.