October 2011
1 post
July 2011
10 posts
What kind of health system does Ontario want? |... →
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...
Peel’s ‘hard-line’ police abuse the law: critics |... →
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...
The locavore's dilemma | Edward L. Glaeser →
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...
Richard Dawkins on vivisection: "But can they... →
… 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...
Gary Greenberg’s “Manufacturing Depression” and... →
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...
Hip Implants Show That New Is Not Always Improved... →
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...
Death in the Pot | Deborah Blum →
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...
Jonathan Lebed's Extracurricular Activities |... →
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...
June 2011
24 posts
Lastman urges Ford to go to Pride - thestar.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.”
Parl41 Questions (p41questions) on Twitter →
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...
Ottawa cites deficit in eliminating auditing jobs... →
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...
Why is the right winning?
Tim Hudak’s “sneaky eco-tax” and “taxes yet to come” lines were the highlight of watching last night’s game. That and his vigorously nodding head and general resemblance to Andy of The Office. As a typography snob, I take particular exception to the straight-quote in “It’s” at the end of the ad — Not An Apostrophe(tm). Who takes this guy...
“If this tactic sounds familiar, it’s because the Ontario Catholic School...”
– Catholic board bans rainbows. (Kittens, sparkles, unicorns still okay) - The Globe and Mail
Details missing from Tories’ deficit-fighting plan... →
On Monday, Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page reported he’s still waiting for answers as to how the government is implementing a spending freeze first announced in the 2010 budget – 15 months ago. He reported that while recent government documents show more than 6,000 positions will be eliminated over three years, that covers only about one-third of the promised spending cuts.
...
Arab States Need Real Economic Reform | Yglesias →
Confirmation bias blogging on my part:
“The young protesters of the Jasmine Revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt, many of them university graduates, overthrew the old regime because it impeded or blocked them from careers that would offer engaging work and the chance for personal growth. The protesters did not demand more creature comforts or better infrastructure; they demanded opportunities to...
Comments now open
I finally took the time to figure out how to enable comments on this blog, so please, fire away.
The Hail Mary Party
I was thinking more about Alf Apps last night and just why his speech made me so angry.
The problem is not the idea per se, which may or may not have merit. It is certainly a debatable proposition, in the sense of having points on both sides.
The problem is with the conception of how political parties work that throwing this idea out there (while serving as President of the Liberal Party)...
Watch(via Richard Dreyfuss reads the iTunes EULA | Reporters’ Roundtable Podcast - CNET Blogs)
Digging into the data from Canada’s latest... →
Good roundup of GHG data. This part stood out for me:
Inside Canada, provincial emissions results almost always generate some interest. Although Ontario is no longer Canada’s top emitter — a title it has lost in recent years to Alberta — the province is still probably the standout emissions story for 2009. Ontario’s emissions fell by 13 per cent from 2008 to 2009, moving the...
Health reform: One way capitalism can make health... →
Fascinating anecdote from M.S. at The Economist about how markets add costs to the American healthcare system:
A medical technology company is going public to generate the money it needs to advertise its products to hospital directors and insurance-company reimbursement officers. This entails significant extra expenditures for marketing, the new stocks issued to fund the marketing will...
Short logic (Groupon IPO: Pass on this deal) |... →
Great piece on the ridiculous logic underlying startup valuations:
Groupon has filed its S-1 and hopes to raise $750M in its initial public offering. Given they’re currently losing a staggering $117M per quarter, despite revenues of $644M, they’ll be burning through that cash almost as soon as it hits their account.
At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to make $1, and it doesn’t look...
Liberal president calls for expanded Charter of... →
This is really, really dumb:
Alfred Apps, who faced calls from within the party for his resignation after the Liberals’ crushing electoral defeat, speaking to the Empire Club of Canada in a downtown Toronto ballroom, said his party should make the push for a “second Charter” one its fundamental long-term goals.
He also said the Liberals should adopt policies that support mandatory voting...
In defense of Canada | The Incidental Economist →
Great collection of graphs and facts about the sustainability and outcomes of Canada’s healthcare system, particularly vis a vis the US model.
When building gazebos violates the public trust |... →
There are no words.
The final lines about “diligent MPs” really piss me off, frankly. Diligent MPs did expose this bullshit, and their reward was to have their concerns completely and totally ignored by this same editorial board.
The overwhelming lesson here is that Globe editorials are primarily rhetorical exercises designed to capture the common mood in words longer than 3...
Ottawa, native leaders commit to sweeping overhaul... →
This is great news:
Historically, the relationship between the chiefs and Ottawa has been characterized by grievance and obstruction, with endless negotiations over land claims and self-governance enriching mostly lawyers. But a combination of factors appears to be shifting the debate in a different direction.
One was the apology and compensation offered by the federal government in...
May 2011
69 posts
Cowboys and Pit Crews | Atul Gawande →
From his commencement address at Harvard Medical School:
The distance medicine has travelled in the couple of generations since is almost unfathomable for us today. We now have treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousand of diagnoses and conditions that afflict human beings. We have more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures, and you, the clinicians...
Layton's political drift | Chris Selley →
A great piece, wish there were more like it. Worth reading just to get context for this quote:
“At this point our time-warp link was damaged by a current surge which broke our chrono-commu-tator, and we have been unable to re-establish contact.”
Harper plays to his base, while fending off a... →
The lifting of the CPC’s siege mentality is another structural factor that may stall the rise of permanent CPC government — and certainly permanent Harper Government:
In total, the Prime Minister has named 66 Conservatives to Cabinet, or as parliamentary secretaries. This leaves 100 Conservatives on the outside looking in — many of whom are in the process of resigning themselves to...
“If (Layton thinks) 50 per cent plus one is a clear majority, what is an unclear...”
– Stephane Dion
Preserving medicare means accepting changes |... →
I cannot emphasize enough how good this piece is, and what a necessary antidote it is to — you guessed it — Gwyn Morgan:
The anti-medicare approach goes like this: Given the impact of aging, we cannot continue to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on health care. It is time to be grown-up about this, and to make Canadians assume greater individual responsibility for health care by...
The US and UK Have Very Different Political... →
I tend to read and cite a lot of stuff from the US, simply because there is a much more vibrant political blogging and commentary scene down there. But obviously that means trying to keep some perspective on what’s different about their situation than ours.
This piece is a good structural analysis of one key difference:
The British system is both more majoritarian and much less laden...
Why does Washington care so much about deficits? |... →
Obviously our political system and our deficit problems are different. As Stephen Gordon wrote today, getting rid of the US deficit will be much harder than getting rid of ours was in the 1990s (though it is by no means impossible! For example, Congress could simply go home.)
Nevertheless, I think the basic dynamic of deficit-posturing is recognizable, particularly when it comes to...
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to... →
Since this blog is called Live Free or Die, I feel I should occasionally try to focus on issues of freedom. This essay is a thoughtful refutation of an infuriating argument:
The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad...
The Root Cause Of The GOP's Huge Mistake |... →
In the wake of the Democrats’ upset victory in a NY special election yesterday, Jonathan Chait lays out the unpopularity of the Republicans’ goals, and their methods of concealing them:
One favored tactic has been to keep the issues of taxes and spending separate. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush passed large tax cuts that mathematically implied the need for cuts in popular...
Save resource money for the future? Nah, says... →
Jeffrey Simpson’s column today is about a blue-ribbon panel report on economic strategy, commissioned by the Premier of Alberta:
Recommendation One – dead on arrival – says: “stop diverting money received from the sale of non-renewable energy assets into the general revenue fund.” In other words, stop paying for today’s services with resource revenues, which are volatile, unpredictable...