Hanging Gardens

“Hanging Gardens” at Sun Yet Sen Classical Gardens

It Must Be An Age Thing

I can still be a competitive SOB, especially when it comes to things like “Jeopardy.”  I aim to get every question right and though I never make that level of perfection, I usually get pretty close and can get most upset when I miss one.

Tonight there was a question about TV trivia and the answer was “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and I found myself saying out loud: “I’m really glad I didn’t know that!”

Now I am at peace about the whole thing.

Broadband Billing and Dumb Liberals

I am getting sick and tired of liberals claiming that we somehow have a right to broadband connection and therefore the plans by Shaw to charge for access to the internet by usage are somehow immoral. Do these people forget that certain services FAR MORE important than broadband connection — electricity, water, food, gas, for example — are ALL sold on a user-pay basis: the more food you want to eat, the more money you pay for your food; the more electricity you use, the more you pay, etc etc.

To try to place access to broadband as somehow more important than food and water and power simply makes the proponents look stupid.

When these liberals actually try to discuss what is wrong with Shaw’s plan it turns out they object to the profit margin that Shaw is capturing — it costs, say, one penny to deliver one Gb and Shaw wants to charge two bucks.  That’s a fair enough argument — one that the market would quickly resolve but which, in this liberally regulated age, the CRTC can be pressured to solve by putting in place ROI caps, for example.

Stick to the pricing problem, guys, and stop making yourselves look stupid over the “rights” issue.

 

Quite The Year In BC Politics Coming Up, Yawn

To tell the truth, I couldn’t give a damn who wins the leadership battles for both (or either) of our two leading bourgeois political parties. I guess the Liberal race has more intrinsic interest as the winner becomes the Premier, at least for a while.

The NDP’s race is, it seems, to find the most boring leader to keep driving the party into the ground. Maybe I am behind the times, but this is the first detailed poll I have seen on the contest:

It looks like Farnworth is leading in all categories at this point.  Please read again the sentence above that begins “The NDP’s race is, it seems, to find the most boring…”

See what I mean?

32 Years Have Passed Since …

… the “Dukes of Hazzard” appeared on US TV. I was alerted to the fact that today is the anniversary of the show’s premiere in 1979 by an email from a friend; and it sure made me think.

It made me think that my generation simply gave up and allowed the current world to be; it made me think that I’m not convinced we have progressed — changed, yes, but progressed? — since the “Dukes of Hazzard.”

I’ll have to write more about this, but I definitely have a sense of disappointment in what we didn’t do over the last thirty or forty years.

Ship’s Bow No.1

“Ship’s Bow No 1” from Steveston.

Back Again

I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of weeks. I’ve had one infection after other since December 19th and today has been the first time for a while that I’ve felt halfway decent. It was interesting to me that I had no interest in being online during much of that time. Previously I would have thought it was the kind of action that stayed because, physically at least, there is little effort. But the toll the fevers take on your brain makes it very difficult to think in the way that online communication needs; it is always more convenient to nap or walk around the room shivering in a wrap and blankets.

Thank God for antibiotics, I guess! But they sure take apart the digestive system, killing off all the good guys along with the bad. It was the Rubicon today though when, first, I insisted that we go to the Western Lake for dim sum — God! what a wonderful find; Wednesday at 11am was just as good and friendly and BUSY as a Sunday lunch time — and then I was very happy to cook a pork tenderloin for dinner tonight.

Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.

Reason #201 For NOT Using Facebook …

According to Big Brother Watch:

The Telegraph reports that Facebook has now made it easier for third party application developers to request a user’s contact information in return for using an application. According to Facebook’s Developer Blog, the new feature rolled out early on Saturday morning. It is ‘now making a user’s address and mobile phone number accessible’. But the Telegraph and others have missed an important update to this story. Also according to the Facebook’s Developer Blog on Monday, Facebook ‘will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready’ based on ‘use feedback’. One wonders if users were outraged with the possibility of third parties gaining access to even more personal information. Whatever the case, it is important for all of us who use Facebook to check our privacy settings and think twice before using third party applications.

Or just bail, before it is too late!

Shaw’s Negative Billing Option

Some years ago, there was a loud outcry about what was called negative billing. A company (bank, telecom, etc) would set you up for a free-for-a-time service (usually without consulting you) and then make you go through hoops to cancel what would then become an automatic payment onwards into the future once the “free” period was over. Book clubs and record clubs (remember those?) were the classic negative billers: you were sent the months’ selection at full price UNLESS you took some action.

After the kerfuffle here with Rogers and others, negative billing was made illegal, I believe. But Shaw (and maybe others) gets around the law in a clever way: Once you are a subscriber, Shaw allows you to ADD services with a couple of mouse clicks on-line; but you cannot CANCEL services in the same way. Oh, no. To cancel a service you must use Shaw’s telephone lines, successfully navigate through a directory tree, and then listen to a long period of Muzak before finally getting through to a service agent who will then log the cancellation.

I guess this meets the letter of the law, but it sure feels like negative billing to me!

The Spare — Wong Fu Productions

Wonderful modern story-telling, from Japan.

 

Liberals and “Human Rights”

One of my many problems with liberals is that modern-day liberals have become firmly attached to the idea of “identity politics” — that the gays, blacks, women, natives, spiritualists, etc. should somehow be separately equal — which is merely a deeply abased form of “human rights.”  In fact, I strongly suspect that every self-described liberal in North America and Europe would include some sort of agreement with the importance of the concept of “human rights” in their own description of “liberal.” This would be considered by most to be a defining characteristic of liberalism in comparison to, say, conservativism.

The National Interest has an interesting review by John Gray of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History in which Gray demonstrates that the entire history of “human rights” began no earlier than the 1970s. He traces the actual birth of the concept to the publication in 1981 of John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice. He carefully and concisely links the modern “human rights” movement to both utopianism and the modern nation state. These “human rights” exist only in the context of the nation state; they are “universal” only in the sense that every nation state should be held accountable to them and be responsible for their protection. There is no “liberal” scenario that would allow for these “human rights” to exist outside the jurisdiction of nation state(s).

As an anti-statist anarchist myself, I have always rejected the concept of “human rights” based on a dissected population (whites, blacks, rich, women, LGBT, left-handed, etc, etc etc.) It is a defining characteristic in my definition of being a non-liberal.   However, this is a fascinating history of a theory and well worth reading.

Laundry Then and Now

Today is laundry day in our household.  My wife — a self-described laundry Nazi — loves to split the pile of cloths and linens into a much larger variety of “types” than the simple whites, coloureds, reds that my mother taught me.  Thinking of this got me musing about how drastically this particular household function has changed in the last 70-odd years.

Time was that the laundry represented a full day of  hard physical labour, one that most housewives faced each week with dread.  Today, that has all changed, at least in the westernized world.  With automatic machines and efficient driers, each load takes perhaps just four or five minutes of effort to load, unload and fold.  Five or six wash and dry loads can be completed with less physical effort than a single wash load (not including wringing and drying) meant to my grandmother.

In my research on the retail and social changes on Commercial Drive in the middle of the last century, one of the key factors of modernization that emerges in the 1930s and 1940s is the evolution of many hardware stores into appliance retailers; and, prior to the introduction of TV in the 1950s, it was the steady improvement in laundry technology that drove this process.

As an aside, it is worth mentioning that virtually all domestic technology engineers in the 1920s to 1950s were men, men who would have had little or no first-hand knowledge of the drudgery of household laundry.  I assume that the power of persuasion by their female partners played a significant role in these improvements.

 

Political Correctness = Literary Pornography

A new edition of Mark Twain’s  “Huckleberry Finn” will be published next month in which all references to “nigger” and “injun” are to be replaced with “slave”.  Hard to believe that political correctness can go so far.

I wonder what the reaction would be if we re-published “Advise and Consent” and changed all references to “Republicans” with “idiots.”

What Wage Disparity?

For all us wage slaves and fixed-income folks out there, it must make us feel good that by 2:30pm THIS afternoon — the first working day of the year — the top CEOs will already have earned the same salary as it will take us until December 31st to earn.

Canada’s best-paid chief executives earned 155 times the average income earner during the darkest days of the recession, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said in a report Monday.  Declaring that those 100 chief executives were “recession proof,” the think tank said they earned an average of $6.6 million in 2009 compared with $42,988 for the average Canadian.  That means by 2:30 p.m. Monday, the first working day of the year, those CEOs will have earned the full year’s wage of the average Canadian …

“Even that extraordinary number understates the real story,” Mackenzie wrote. “Thanks to a change in corporate reporting introduced in 2008, we only have a conservative statistical estimate of the stock options that make up about one third of CEOs’ 2009 pay. The public will never know how much these CEOs actually got paid in 2009.  As well, “These CEOs are sitting on $1.3 billion of stock options they haven’t yet cashed in. That’s about $2 in future income for every $1 they declared in 2009.”

Ain’t capitalism grand!

A Mixed Start To The Year

On the bad side, my computer is still not working properly: none of the items that need drivers are working; second monitor, sound system, web cam, and my all-important external hard drive are out of my reach.  I blame Microsoft’s “verification signature” for this.

The day my computer came back from the shop, everything was fine.  The next morning when I switched on, there was a message from MS about their verification system.  As I have a perfectly legal and registered version of the MS OS, I was happy to press “Yes” to whatever was on screen.  Major error. It downloaded software and, since that moment, nothing that needs drivers has worked.  I have searched the web for updated drivers and loaded what I can, all without improving the situation.  Now I have to wait until VCV is open again on Tuesday and pay more money to get it fixed.  Damn their eyes in Redmond!!

To make matters worse, I managed to break my glasses this morning and have no idea where my old pair are.  Sheesh!

On the good side, I seem to be back to full health with most of my strength restored. Even more to the good, we went for dim sum this morning at Western Lake and can confirm once again that it is the finest dim sum joint in the entire city.  Packed as always, there were several hundred diners and, once again, the Boss and I were the only non-Chinese. I cannot imagine why others aren’t flocking there but, it is already busy enough so perhaps that’s just as well.  Reservations (as we had today) are always a good idea on the weekends.