(via Steve Jobs: a personal remembrance)

(via Damn You Auto Correct! » The Top 15 Most Popular DYAC Texts Of All Time)

Great column on LHINs:

Ontario has to do decide if it wants to continue to have a health system in which decisional and spending power is concentrated in hospitals or whether it wants regional authorities – called LHINs or something else – that determine the right mix of spending among institutional care, community care, prevention programs and so on.

The fundamental problem is that Ontario has tried to do all these things simultaneously. The result is a bloated bureaucracy with no clear lines of responsibility. The reality is that the province’s regionalization efforts have, at best, been half-assed. LHINs are not the problem, they are a symptom of a much larger problem.

Hudak and Horwath have no real clue what to do about these issues — or if they do, they certainly aren’t revealing their plan. It’s creating tremendous uncertainty in the sector, and already lots of good people are leaving LHINs in anticipation of cuts.

That said, I don’t see that the Liberals have a plan either. They could have spent the last two years reforming LHINs and pushing to (a) show real value in them, and (b) ensure that the decentralization had gone far enough that reversing it would be worse than the alternative. But they haven’t.

Disgusting:

For the second time in less than a month, a judge has set free someone charged by Peel Regional Police, and ruled that officers lied and intimidated suspects.

The double blow from the judiciary has done little to shake the police service that patrols the fast-growing cities of Brampton and Mississauga to the west of Toronto: It has no plans to investigate or discipline the rogue officers.

As I said about Bill Blair: police are given extraordinary powers and extraordinary respect. They should also be held to an extraordinary standard.

In 2008, two Carnegie Mellon researchers analyzed the reduction in carbon emissions that might come from moving to local food. They found that American food consumption produces greenhouse gas equivalent to 8.9 tons of carbon dioxide per household per year. Food delivery represents .4 tons of that total; all agricultural transportation up and down the food chain creates one ton of carbon dioxide per household annually. … … One recent UK report found that the greenhouse gas emissions involved in eating English tomatoes were about three times as high as eating Spanish tomatoes. The extra energy and fertilizer involved in producing tomatoes in chilly England overwhelmed the benefits of less shipping. Even New Zealand lamb produced less greenhouse gases than English lamb. …

But the most important environmental cost of metropolitan agriculture is that lower density levels mean more driving. … If just a twentieth of an acre of metropolitan farm land per person could (implausibly) eliminate half of food delivery emissions, this would typically be associated with 41 more gallons of gas per household. Those driving-related greenhouse gas increases would be 2.4 times higher than the emissions savings from reduced food transport.

The Polish cavalry, April 1939 (via World War II: The Invasion of Poland and the Winter War - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic)

… would you expect a positive or a negative correlation between mental ability and ability to feel pain? Most people unthinkingly assume a positive correlation, but why?

Isn’t it plausible that a clever species such as our own might need less pain, precisely because we are capable of intelligently working out what is good for us, and what damaging events we should avoid? Isn’t it plausible that an unintelligent species might need a massive wallop of pain, to drive home a lesson that we can learn with less powerful inducement?

At very least, I conclude that we have no general reason to think that non-human animals feel pain less acutely than we do, and we should in any case give them the benefit of the doubt.

I would add: why should we think that love (or feelings of emotional attachment) are any less strong or meaningful in “unthinking” animals than in people?

Many people today are infatuated with the biological determinants of things. They find compelling the idea that moods, tastes, preferences, and behaviors can be explained by genes, or by natural selection, or by brain amines (even though these explanations are almost always circular: if we do x, it must be because we have been selected to do x). People like to be able to say, I’m just an organism, and my depression is just a chemical thing, so, of the three ways of considering my condition, I choose the biological. People do say this. The question to ask them is, Who is the “I” that is making this choice? Is that your biology talking, too?

The decision to handle mental conditions biologically is as moral a decision as any other. It is a time-honored one, too. Human beings have always tried to cure psychological disorders through the body. In the Hippocratic tradition, melancholics were advised to drink white wine, in order to counteract the black bile. (This remains an option.) Some people feel an instinctive aversion to treating psychological states with pills, but no one would think it inappropriate to advise a depressed or anxious person to try exercise or meditation.

The recommendation from people who have written about their own depression is, overwhelmingly, Take the meds! …

… What if your sadness was grief, though? And what if there were a pill that relieved you of the physical pain of bereavement—sleeplessness, weeping, loss of appetite—without diluting your love for or memory of the dead?

These stories are terrifically important if you are a healthcare policymaker, practitioner or consumer:

A review of the medical world’s embrace of the metal-on-metal hips over the past decade — including interviews with doctors, industry consultants, regulators, medical experts and patients — shows how innovation’s lure led almost everyone to seize on a product promoted as a breakthrough without convincing evidence that it was better or even as good as existing options.

An essay on food poisoning and food safety regulation:

History’s best-known poisoners, for the most part, aimed low rather than high. They mixed arsenic into oatmeal, aconitine into cake and curry, mercury into figs, and they served these toxic snacks to husbands and wives, lovers and mistresses, friends, family, and business partners, repeatedly demonstrating that deliberate poisoning of food is mostly a domestic affair. Consider the horrifying example of Mary Ann Cotton, a British arsenic killer born in 1832, who was suspected of killing around twenty people—including three husbands, one lover, and most of her own children—probably by mixing arsenic into their morning cereal or evening soup.

Fascinating story about a 14-year-old boy who started trading and promoting stocks on the internet (in 1999!) and eventually gave $285,000 to the SEC in a settlement — while keeping $500,000:

To anyone who wandered into the money culture after, say, January 1996, it would have seemed absurd to take anything said by putative financial experts at face value. There was no reason to get worked up about it. The stock market was not an abstraction whose integrity needed to be preserved for the sake of democracy. It was a game people played to make money. Who cared if anything anyone said or believed was ”real”? Capitalism could now afford for money to be viewed as no different from anything else you might buy or sell.

This is by far the coolest thing you will see today, or this week, or this month:

In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. (via Russia in color, a century ago - The Big Picture - Boston.com)

But the conservative businessman acknowledged the Pride world — at least the one he had seen on TV and in newspapers — seemed foreign and a little scary.

When Pride invited him in ’98, Lastman agonized until his son Dale sat him down and said: “You have to go, you’re the mayor of all the people, you made a promise.’ He was right and I figured I should go.”

Over the last few days I’ve immensely enjoyed the work being done by this mysterious Twitterer on the budget.

An emerging meme of the 41st Parliament seems to be that the NDP is too busy Making Parliament Work to actually do the work of Parliament: examining and opposing the government’s agenda, rather than lubricating it. Today, the Finance Committee spent a grand total of 90 minutes reviewing the budget bill, which includes changes to spending, shipping, and mortgage insurance — waaaiiiit….

So we have mystery Twitterers instead.

These mortgage insurance changes are interesting. It looks, from what we can see, like the government is giving itself the authority to take over mortgage insurance policies from insurers that are struggling. Today, the government and the CMHC refused to give a clear answer to the simple question of “how many billions of dollars of additional liability does this put on the government?”

This is additionally made interesting by the fact that in his previous life, Jim Flaherty was one of Canada’s leading lawyers for mortgage insurers. Combine that with the PM’s new(-ish) Bay St. chief of staff, and it really looks like this decision deserves some additional oversight from the people paid to provide it (i.e. MPs).

The decision to eliminate auditing jobs at Public Works is raising eyebrows given the department’s close connection to political contracting scandals throughout history. The department is in the midst of overseeing a $35-billion wave of military purchases – including new ships and icebreakers – that carries political implications as Canada’s regions battle over the contracts.

Because right now, we have such a clear picture of the government’s spending decisions that really these auditing jobs are redundant.

It will also be interesting to see whether spending on auditing goes up (as a result of using the private sector) or if the volume of auditing just goes down. I don’t really think there are alternative possible outcomes, unless these resources just aren’t being used right now.