murraysovereign

First look at the new neighbourhood

BUMP. About 20 minutes to touchdown NASA TV live stream Friend of mine is watching from JPL - he's retired NASA ("Lead Launch Operations Manager - Cape Canaveral" : by far the coolest business card in my whole collection) and he still gets front-row seats whenever there's cool stuff going on. He hasn't invited me to sit in with him yet, though

I wouldn't mind letting them have the remote, either, if they'd learn how to use it properly. Women seem to use the remote solely to find out what's on, whereas men understand the real utility of the remote is that it allows you to find out what else is on.

"Insite" site

Actually, their argument was more that the Insight facility is resulting in a net reduction in demand for the health care system. Prevention and early intervention are more effective uses of limited resources than simply reacting to emergencies. No surprise there - the same holds true for cancer, obesity, smoking, work-place safety, clean drinking water... show me an area of health care that doesn't benefit from prevention and/or early intervention. It's not necessarily always about self-interested bureaucracies promoting their own self-interested agendas.

Insight is the name of the safe-injection site the city of Vancouver set up in the downtown eastside. Supervised "shooting gallery", clean needles, and drug counselling in an attempt to reduce the incidence of accidental overdoses, slow the rate of HIV infection from used needles, and divert users into treatment programs. It's been running for a couple of years now, under an exemption to the federal legislation that would otherwise make it illegal. The former Liberal government established it, and the exemption is now up for renewal, but the current Conservative government is reluctant to do it. Depending on who you listen to, it's either a step in the right direction, or a moral abomination. Most of the available evidence apparently seems to indicate that it's helping, in that the overdose rate and HIV rates are being positively impacted, and users are availing themselves of treatment programs at an increased rate due to their frequent interactions with the facility's staff. Drug-related activity on the streets in the immediate vicinity seems to be down, but there's no clear causal link. I don't have the stats behind those assertions, but that's the gist of the "pro"-side of the debate. There was a recent report from the Vancouver health-care community appealing to Ottawa to allow the facility to continue operating because of its positive effects. That report may be available on-line, but I haven't time to try looking for it right now. The "con" side seems to be made up mostly of the tough-on-crime faction of the Conservative party, and I think the national association of Chiefs of Police are also opposed to renewing the exemption, but the local beat cops are more likely to be supportive as I recall.

I've always understood that the single most reliable predictor of crime rates is the percentage of the population consisting of males aged 15 - 29, or some such grouping. There are plenty of other contributing factors, certainly, but they're of secondary importance after the demographics. Comparing Prohibition with the current "War on Drugs" doesn't quite work, either. Prohibition attempted to take something that was regularly used by most of the population and make it illegal, with predictable results. The so-called war on drugs is little more than a concerted crack-down on a range of substances that have always been illegal, and that have never been as widely used as alcohol. So that graph showing a spike in murder rates coincident with Prohibition makes sense, whereas the relationship between crime stats and the "War on Drugs" is less clear. I agree with Jay that it would probably be cheaper to just give the stuff away for free, than to continue absorbing all the various costs associated with drug-related crime. If the Conservatives in Ottawa can see past their ideological objections and allow the Insight experiment to continue in Vancouver we may be able to start collecting some meaningful data, albeit on a limited geographic area and population.

If drugs were legalized, only legals would have drugs.

I think one possible explanation is the western trend toward deferred childbearing in recent decades. Motherhood beyond your mid-thirties used to be relatively uncommon. Now we've got women having children well into their forties, and I understand there's a pretty clear statistical correlation between birth defects of various kinds and the age of the mother. How much of this increase in autism is occurring among children whose mothers were in their twenties vs those in their later thirties and on?

Maybe because you don't get the CBC where you live? I saw that Fifth Estate program when it first ran a few years ago, and a couple of times since in reruns. They ran another good one on the US media post-9/11 that was pretty good, too. I particularly enjoyed watching Bob McEwan(?) trying to explain to Ann Coulter that a) no WMDs were ever found in Iraq and, b) no, in fact Canada did not contribute troops to the Vietnam War. She insisted, vigorously, that he was wrong on both counts. The woman's completely stunned.

There have been articles decrying the state of the public health care system and proposing various ways to fix it for as long as we've had a public health care system. Before that the articles were decrying the state of the private health care system and proposing various ways to fix it. And before there was a private health care system there were probably articles decrying the complete absence of a health care system.

My recollection is that the legislation specifically requires revenue neutrality. And smart meters have been mentioned also, perhaps they're to be mandatory in new construction (?) or something like that, phasing them in over a period of time. With those, you would be billed based on hourly consumption and the rates would vary through the day. Not sure if that's been legislated or just in discussion, but it's certainly on the horizon. I'm generally in favour of transferring the tax burden from the earning side to the consumption side of the equation. And if it can also provide some incentive for people to reduce their energy use at the same time, so much the better.

Dizzy, feverish, falling down stairs, vertigo... Someone want to call the editor of "Accidents in North American Mountaineering"? We may have a scoop coming up.

Seems like there's a pretty big spectrum between doing nothing and empowering the state to enforce a centralized emissions rationing scheme... I think it's possible to envision using liberal means to create a state of affairs where cranking up the heater to 82 degrees in the winter is seen as being as foolish as stoking a chimney with a stack of 20s, or as socially acceptable as taking a dump on your neighbor's lawn. Any thoughts on our pending steps down that road? As of July 1 the BC government will be collecting a carbon tax at various rates on different forms of energy. But they've designed it to be revenue-neutral, so the projected revenues from the carbon tax will be off-set by cuts to personal and corporate income taxes. I think it's an interesting approach. Taken to its extreme, the carbon tax or energy tax could be increased annually and income taxes reduced by an equivalent amount until income taxes are completely eliminated. The economic drag caused by the high energy tax would be offset by the stimulus of eliminating personal and corporate income taxes. I don't know if anyone has studied the net economic impact of taking it all the way to that point. At first glance it intuitively looks like it should be about a wash, but it's possible that such a policy could be positive for the provincial economy. If you view taxation as a deliberate disincentive to engage in certain behaviours, or as a punishment for same, I'd rather be punished for burning gas than for earning a living, particularly if I could minimize the punishment by the simple expedient of not wasting energy. There's a fair bit of opposition to the scheme, particularly in the interior where heating and transportation costs are already higher and the income tax cut likely will not make up for the added energy costs. Snoboy driving around the Kootenays in a big orange Unimog comes to mind. I'm more inclined to approve, in part simply because I think it's an intriguing approach to taxation policy. In theory, it's a good way to go. Of course, my income tax savings will more than offset my increased energy costs, so if it turns out to be a mistake I'll at least pocket a little $$$ before it all gets overturned.

It'll be a bit of each - a few skis are just getting new graphics (Rapid Transit for sure, others I don't recall offhand). Some skis are brand new for next year (Spitfire, Saint and others)

We've warrantied a number of Petzl headlamps over the years for that cracking problem. We just give the customer a new one, send the broken one to Petzl, and they either credit our account or send us a replacement unit. No problems, ever. Not sure about BD's headlamps, specifically, but in general we find them pretty painless to warranty things with as well.

Not in the plans, as far as I know. In fact, because the gasoline version they brought over for the US market is now the de-facto "North American" model, we may not be able to get the cdi in Canada anymore, either.

I got my Pulse Cabrio in about three days. But they'd been available in Canada for several years by that time, so the waiting list was a thing of the past. They just had to transfer it over from another dealership. Which model did you order?

I do try, honest, but it just doesn't seem to be working. See what I mean?

Ummm... did you take the ad's suggestion and Google "Lauren Phoenix"? That "organic model" is a porn actress. A Canadian porn actress at that. The company you want to support, American Apparel, is using porn stars to promote their product, and foreign porn stars at that. So even your porn is being outsourced now. What's left?

Not exactly. In refining a barrel of oil, a certain amount of gasoline is produced - let's say 30 gallons although I don't know the exact ratios. Additionally, another 15 gallons of diesel is produced from the same barrel of oil. It isn't an either/or process. If you're refining oil to make gasoline, you're going to get the diesel anyway as a byproduct. So you might as well use it, right? And since diesel contains something like 15% more energy per unit than gasoline, and since diesel engines are mechanically more efficient than gasoline engines, they're able to do considerably more work per unit of fuel and thus produce significantly less greenhouse gas emissions per unit of work. And when you're finished doing all that work you've still 30 gallons of gasoline kicking around somewhere, because you didn't need it for your diesel engine.

Particulate is not a greenhouse gas. Particulate is fine particles of soot that remain suspended in the air. And being so fine, when inhaled they tend to lodge deep in the lungs and accumulate there. This causes respiratory problems like asthma and, in extreme cases, black lung. So particulate is a concern particularly in urban areas because concentrations can get quite high, and pose a significant health risk. It's also a component of visible smog. But it's got nothing to do with global warming.

We've known about this for quite a while up on this side of the line, too. Fish in Bow Lake and Lake Louise - to name a couple of prominent examples - are not fit to eat. Seems that airborne pollutants precipitate out as snow, which melts into lakes that stay so cold the chemicals never re-evaporate and move on. So they just keep accumulating. Ultimately it all ends up in the Arctic, depriving the Innu of their traditional foods because seal and beluga flesh is poisoned by chemicals that originated in industrial areas thousands of miles away. Mothers in some areas of the Arctic are cautioned against breast-feeding their children because their own bodies are toxic. And some people think old balloons in the backcountry are a problem...

Should'a come to Squamish

#10 - Thou shalt not covet. WTF? I'm not allowed to want anything? Why not? As long as I don't do anything that could be construed as violating #8 "Thou shalt not steal", why shouldn't I be able to want anything I damned well feel like wanting? I say we lose #1-4 and #10, and add in "Thou shalt not wreck the place". That leaves us with a nice, easy to carry six-pack of commandments, and I think it will find much greater acceptance among the general public than the current ten.