Double Blind

The case of Shavluk v. Green Party of Canada stemmed from John Shavluk’s pulled endorsement by the Green Party in the 2008 federal election. Shakluk’s claim to infamy, other than being a pro-Marijuana activist, was that he made some comments about a “shoddily built Jewish world bank headquarters” which lead to his removal.

While this lawsuit has legal ramifications for all political parties, what is interesting is it gives a small glimpse at the vetting process the Green Party took up to the 2008 election – mainly none. This wasn’t a snap decision by any means – his nomination was endorsed well in advance of the election.

[6] Mr. Shavluk became a member of the Green Party after learning that the party platform endorsed the legalization of marijuana. He later decided to seek nomination as a candidate for the party in the next federal election. He submitted an application in March 2007. As part of this process Mr. Shavluk testified he went through a vetting process in which he provided a list of the forum sites on which he posted. He discussed his beliefs and his political activism.

[7] It was his testimony that the link to the Frost Cloud forum would have come up in a search of his postings although this should be viewed in some context. Mr. Shavluk was clearly a frequent communicator on internet forums. For example, he had apparently contributed over 1,100 postings to the Frost Cloud forum alone by 2006.

[8] Mr. Shavluk was the only person to apply for nomination to the Newton-North Delta riding in March 2007. He then went through a second process to secure the nomination in April 2007. The Green Party issued a press release dated May 17, 2007 acknowledging his success in winning the nomination.

[9] Ms. May testified that she was aware of Mr. Shavluk’s previous criminal conviction and his advocacy for the legalization of marijuana at the time of his nomination. She stated that she had some concerns and asked Ben West to work with Mr. Shavluk to have a solid response to why the party would support the candidacy of someone with a criminal conviction. It was her testimony that while as party leader she was prepared to support Mr. Shavluk’s candidacy including the criminal conviction, she emphasized that it was crucial that he disclose “chapter and verse” everything the media could raise. Mr. Shavluk assured her that he would.

[10] In September 2007, Mr. Shavluk received an inquiry from Sean Holman, of Public Eye Radio and Public Eye Online with respect to the 2006 Frost Cloud posting. The query was:

Just to be clear the two questions I had were:

1) What’s your personal opinion on 9-11?

2) One of your postings refers to the World Trade Centre as a “shoddily built Jewish world bank headquarters” – why might that be? Do you think the World Trade Centre is a Jewish world bank headquarters?

Mr. Shavluk responded. In the result, there was no publication in the media concerning the posting at the time.

[11] Mr. Shavluk received a letter dated January 8, 2008 from the Green Party advising that the review of his candidacy by the party had been completed. The letter of endorsement of his candidacy signed by Ms. May as party leader was signed April 9, 2008. Mr. Shavluk decided to seek a position on the Green Party Federal Council and he was informed by e-mail dated June 6, 2008 that his candidacy for that election was approved by the party.

I’m sure the Green Party has improved their candidate nomination processes. Although the party fields 308 candidates just so they can suck up as much popular vote as possible (because they get the $2 per voter per year federal funding), many candidates that come in are marginal at best, which is one reason why a lot of people don’t take the Green party seriously – a lot of these fringe candidates do the party a lot more damage than the $5000/year they would bring in income to the Green Party by being a losing candidate on the ballot.

EKOS released a poll today showing the Conservatives would stand to lose seats in the next election. But one can easily tell a poll is flawed when they read the following:

As well, the EKOS projections show the Green Party winning four seats – one in Ontario and three in British Columbia, where party leader Elizabeth May has decided to run.

Three seats in British Columbia? Are these guys kidding?

My analysis on March 12, 2009, why the Green Party will not win a single seat in a Canadian election, still stands.

To suggest one seat is absurd enough, but to suggest the Greens will win four is hilarious.

Another story about iPad/AT&T (USA-only) subscribers getting hacked. The exploit was due to a bad security design on AT&T’s part, rather than any problem with the iPad itself (other than the fact that the iPad device is popular, and thus a target for hackers).

The core lesson here is that any networked data is likely to be vulnerable.

I remember a decade ago that the visionaries were saying that in the future, all data will be networked, and thus impervious to the usual problems with locally held data – you don’t have to worry about a disk crash or a house fire wiping out your photo albums.

However, the flip side of having everything up on the internet is that you are susceptible to getting hacked, and your data security compromised.

The Battlestar Galactica mantra of “no networked computers” seems to be quite relevant in the 21st century as well. The copy of Windows XP I have has probably a dozen unpublished exploits out on it, running a browser (Firefox) that likely has a ton of exploits and this website running WordPress has been known to be susceptible to spam-style attacks where hacks modify the script template for Google gaming purposes.

It seems the only valid security model these days is pulling the network jack out of the computer.

Back in the 1990′s, the players were the telecoms we know today (Telus, Bell) and three companies that the younger generation doesn’t know much of today – CanTel (which was taken over by Rogers), Microcell (which is most known as Fido, but was taken over by Rogers) and Clearnet (which was taken over by Telus).

Putting a long business story short, all the original competitors went away except for Telus, Bell and Rogers. Telus and Bell had their landline markets subsidizing the wireless capital construction, while Rogers had (and still has) their cable business. CanTel, Microcell and Clearnet were exclusively wireless providers and did not have enough financial capacity to remain as businesses. Microcell was the last holdout before it got munched by Rogers in 2004; although it should be noted that Microcell was in dire financial straits well before this date.

Fast forward ten years and the consolidation, and we now have some new entrants into the Canadian wireless market. They are Public Mobile (concentrating exclusively on the low end user of Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal); Wind Mobile (recently introduced in Vancouver and currently concentrating on a broad approach across metropolitan centers in Canada minus Quebec) and Mobilicity (in the same market space as Wind).

I predict that none of these companies will be making any money, but the consumer, over the next couple years, will be receiving some excellent deals for mobile voice/data service.

In particular, Wind Mobile should be a formidable competitor by virtue of having a deep-pocketed parent, Orascom. I am less certain that Mobilicty will last as long, simply because they likely are less capitalized. I have no idea how Public Mobile will do, but they appear to have a very low cost approach which may work simply because the major companies have too much fixed overhead to compete properly (on a cost basis) against Public.

I also highly suspect that the reason why Shaw Cable is waiting so long to get into the mobile market (even though they have made the proper wireless spectrum purchases) is because they want to see who consolidates with who – or maybe consider its entry into the Canadian wireless market through a purchase once Wind and Mobilicity have lost enough money and want to give up.

So my deep suspicion is that Shaw Cable and the retail consumer will be the big winner in the Canadian wireless market over the next few years.

On Wednesday June 2, 2010, the government introduced a bill to modify the copyright act. Declan over at Crawl Across the Ocean also has some comments on it.

I am waiting for the House of Commons staff to produce a good detailed legislative summary – they typically will do this for significant bills. However, I did skim the bill, and this is an improvement over the previous Bill C-61, which was aborted due to the federal election (not because of Parliament being prorogued as the CBC article stated!).

I do not think Bill C-32 will pass through the House, which is probably a good thing – status quo is currently the best option for Canadians.

I will know that a bill to modify the copyright act is correctly drafted if either both the “Joe Canadian” constituency and the “Entertainment/Media Industry” constituency either both strongly agree, or strongly disagree with it. If one constituency agrees with it and one disagrees with it, chances are the bill is stacked to one direction.

Right now, the feedback would suggest Joe Canadian (Michael Geist would probably fit into this category) is mildly against the bill, which is better than the previous incarnation of the legislation. The “entertainment/media” lobby is still gushing over it, so I suspect the legislation will need to be modified.

Even if the legislation is passed, the experience in the USA will suggest that people will still be downloading stuff willy-nilly. The only difference will be that the legislation will make more people technical criminals. In particular, making provisions that go against breaking digital locks is laughable considering that you can be sure that products will be flowing very easily over from China and other countries that continue to laugh at the very notion of copyright protection. This is going to be a classic case of “the tighter you squeeze your fist, the easier it will be to slip through the cracks.”

I notice that the new national lottery, Lotto Max, has a June 4, 2010 draw for a $50M jackpot and five separate $1M draws.

You have to choose 7 numbers from 1 to 49. The actual odds of getting all 7 numbers is (7!/(49!/42!)) or approximately 1 chance in 85,900,584. (For those of you that don’t know the mathematical notation, “!” means “factorial”, which means 7! is 7*6*5*4*3*2*1 = 5040).

Each $5 ticket enables you to pick three draws of 7 numbers, so the precise odds of winning with one $5 ticket is the above odds multiplied by three, which turns out to be one in 28,633,528.

So your expected value out of a $5 ticket is $50M / 28,633,528 + 5*($1M / 28,633,528) = $1.92/ticket, at least with the main prizes and most importantly, not assuming any splits of prizes (i.e. somebody else having a winning ticket). The expected value of the 6 plus bonus, 6 and 5 number draws, given past performance, is approximately $1.34, so the value of an entire ticket is about $3.26 with a large main prize. In other words, you are sacrificing about 35% of your equity for a chance of winning a million dollars (or more).

Your chance of getting any prize worth $1M or above (which is generally what people want, rather than a high expected value) is one in 4,772,254, again assuming no splits.

The Lotto 6/49, by comparison, has far superior expected value, but slightly less probability of winning a $1M+ prize, assuming you buy 2.5 tickets (which would given a chance of winning of 5,593,526 to one).

Finally, it should be stated that 1 in 5,000,000 is an exceedingly unlikely probability. To give you an idea how unlikely it is, if you played a 5,000,000-to-one lottery continuously once per second, it would take you 38.2 days in order to have a 50% chance of winning at least one big prize.

It’s probably not worth $5 to discover this.

The BC government in the previous budget is now enabling people that own homes and financially supporting somebody that is 18 years old or younger to defer their property taxes, at the rate of interest of the bank prime rate. Previously only seniors (55 and older) were able to exercise this option.

Essentially homeowners are given the option of borrowing money (the amount of their yearly property taxes) at the prime rate, and will only have to repay this amount when your property is transferred (i.e. you sell the place).

Almost everybody that is financially sophisticated that is eligible to do this should be exercising this option. Getting money at the prime rate outside a mortgage is not that easy, and at the prime rate you can very likely make an investment that would give a higher rate of return.

The trick is making the interest amount tax-deductible, and if you use the deferred property tax amount for income-generation purposes then in theory you should be able to deduct the interest.

CKNW reports:

Translink is considering luring drivers to the Golden Ears Bridge with sale prices on tolls during slow periods.

Spokesman Ken Hardie says they want to encourage more people to take the bridge and make up for lower-than-expected revenue. But he says there’s no drop-dead date to make a decision, “We’ll reassess it continuously. We have had a very positive trend particularly in March and April, and we anticipate that trend is going to continue throughout the summer months and we expect to be pretty close to our targets by July and August.”

Hardie blames the light traffic volume on the economic downturn, noting there are less truckers transporting less goods and housing developments on either side of the river are well behind schedule.

I have a two observations.

One is that Ken Hardie and the Translink staff clearly read Double Blind when I suggested the implementation of variable-based pricing. (OK, I don’t think they read this, but at least I can say they probably saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants that would recommend the same idea).

Two is that citing the “economic downtown” is no longer an excuse. It is a cop-out. Basically the real excuse should be that they just overestimated the numbers of people that would use the bridge and were overly-optimistic on the assumptions. Whenever developing a new route through a corridor that has no prior traffic on it, traffic estimates will be highly variable. If you put a new structure on top of an existing traffic route, you would have a fairly good estimate of traffic – e.g. if you replaced the Patullo Bridge with an equivalent structure, your traffic estimate would be within 5%.

This should be dumped into the “obvious” category but a couple weeks ago I bought some ground beef and sausages from my favourite meat store (Fraser Valley Meats), which is a very reputable establishment.

The sausages I prepared and ate fairly quickly. Unfortunately the original intention was to use the ground beef, but I never got around to it. It of course was in the refrigerator. Fast forward two weeks later, I pull out the ground beef, and it looked bloodied up and had a fishy type smell, which is an obvious indicator of bacterial growth.

I put it on a hot pan (just wanted to see how it smelled while cooking), and also searched the internet. The internet unambiguously confirmed my suspicion that I could be doing myself a bit of nutritional damage by eating it if it is not properly cooked, but was silent on what would happen if I really cooked the thing bone-dry at a very high temperature. Although in theory if you cook the stuff long enough, the bacteria (e.g. E-Coli, Salmonella, etc.) could be cooked dead, but why bother taking the risk – at most you should keep it in the fridge about five days (again, at this is at the very highest and this is assuming your fridge is properly calibrated at a 3-4 degree Celsius temperature). If you are intending to not use ground beef, then it should be frozen as quickly as possible for future usage.

I remember cooking a batch of mushrooms that were pre-sliced and in the fridge for a few days. I got a distinct ammonia smell coming from the pan – this was a tell-tale sign to not eat the mushrooms and to throw them out immediately.

In both instances one can do a lot of damage by eating food that has been in the fridge too long. I always feel bad throwing away food, but ever since I had an incident of food poisoning last year (thankfully not of my own cooking – it was from a non-fast food restaurant that I would have thought would serve food that wouldn’t poison myself) which put me out of commission for the better part of a week (and didn’t have solid poop until a week later) I have been extra careful in ensuring that it never happens again.

The $1 billion+ security costs for the G8/G20 conference leads to one conclusion: we should never host an event like this again.

It makes hosting the Olympics look cheap.

At least with the Olympics you have a hope of reclaiming some revenue through ticket sales. The G8/G20? Good luck.

Maybe the G8/G20 should be in Antarctica – it would likely be cheaper to shuttle and feed dignitaries there than to actually have to deal with all the security issues.