Obviously the Conservative Minister of the Environment doesn’t care to read reports on sustainable development, so the corporation serves no purpose. To keep operating it would be a greater dishonesty, just as it would have been to pretend Canada was going to make its Kyoto commitments. Progressive outrage is misdirected: it’s no surprise that the Conservatives don’t care about the environment.

The government funds universities, NGOs (through tax-deductible donations) and Ministry policy analysts. There are two models for how policy can be generated:

• Impartial Ministry policy analysts summarize impartial academic research and deliver it to Ministers who swallows it whole
• NGO and corporate lobbyists battle it out in biased reports and the Minister’s office, Ministerial aids help the Minister decide who to listen to

The first model was predominant in the past, but New Public Management theory said that policy analysts, as rational economic agents, could not be trusted to deliver impartial advice. Governments concluded that at least with lobbyists the biases were out in the open. Antagonistic processes are considered the least-worst solutions in many parts of our society, such as resource allocation and the justice system. The National Round Table is a relic from an earlier era.

The lobbyist model puts a lot of power in the hands of Ministerial aids (who whisper in the Minister’s ear) and is skewed because corporate lobbyists have more resources than NGO lobbyists. As a public servant, I’d love to see the functions of lobbyists all brought inside the government, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Antiviral drugs were developed in the 1960s and could be used to treat things like chickenpox. It turns out that there isn’t a big market for treating chickenpox. So the drug company’s advertisers created the idea that genital herpes was bad and you should buy something to treat it. They were quite successful at getting the media on board and culture followed.

Today genital herpes is considered a serious sexually-transmitted infection. Herpes and human papillomavirus (HPV) are the two STIs which a condom only partially protects against (30% lower risk). There are online dating sites specifically for people with symptomatic herpes. Amongst my peers they’re a bigger concern than human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), ironically because antiviral drugs have progressed to the point where they’re effective at treating HIV.

Meanwhile, the media are engaged in scaremongering about HPV, leading governments to subsidize vaccines. I’m not saying that it’s not good to prevent cervical cancer, but I’m skeptical that HPV is being rationally evaluated. (Remember, when doctors move from is to ought, they stop being scientists and start being policy analysts.)

Skrillex was at the right place at the right time to ride the brostep wave: the dubstep accepted by the mainstream is boiled down to its essence as the drop followed by “crunchy” womp-womp-womp (or wub-wub-wub). Brostep is “in a sense ‘counter-culture’ in its rejection of preconceived notions of how music ‘should sound’”. All his songs are based particularly closed on the pop song structure, which effectively creates emotional tension. His songs have a very narrow emotional range that is created using very similar samples in all his songs.

Historically, dubstep was considered an “introspective” genre that was quite emotionally nuanced. This trend lives on in the cross-pollination of dubstep and minimal techno. The other direction dubstep has gone, as expanded upon in a comment by FelixByrd, is to be a mixing pot of diverse influences – apparently Bassnectar is a good example of this. As YouTube will show you, a dubstep remix can be made of any song and a dubstep song can bring in any sample.

Skrillex used to be a punk guitar player. He has a distinct look and a good stage presence. He started out as a producer, essentially playing around with a narrow range as discussed above. When he started DJing, he didn’t have much in the way of DJ skills. He’s an argument one way or another in the debate about whether DJs are more than jukeboxes. Apparently his skills have matured since then.

The mainstreaming of brostep has brought a large number of unsophisticated fans. Many of them consume dubstep because it’s fashionable and don’t really care about the rest of the genre. This has created a vicious cycle in electronic music, because the brostep fanbase is large enough to distort the entire genre. We “hate” Skrillex because he represents that process.

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly…The dialogue is constructed so that our bodies are a source of speculation, ridicule, and invalidation, as if they belong to others…

However, she notes “inevitably some will comment that because I am a creative person, I have abdicated my right to a distinction between my public and private selves, an additional, albeit related, track of highly distorted thinking that will have to be addressed at another time.” Here’s my distorted thinking:

Her plea would be more convincing if her entire career weren’t built in a system that handsomely rewards female beauty. She should be held responsible for deciding to capitalize on her appearance while more talented but less beautiful actresses cannot. In particular, she is being paid to be the face of H. Stern Jewelery and an Estée Lauder cosmetic brand called American Beauty.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking celebrities are people like you and me. They’re brands that sell based on their appearance. Speculating on Judd’s face is no different from discussing the shape of the iPad 3. The problem is not that we care about Judd’s plastic surgery, the problem is that we care about Judd at all.

Despite the author it’s a good essay.

“The system we would bring in would be backed by a fund. Bitcoin may work for the small group of people that believe in its value, but that could change very suddenly.” – Marc Brule, Chief Financial Officer, Royal Canadian Mint

The Canadian Mint’s currency is called MintChips. They will be produced by the Mint, which can control inflation. MintChip transactions are superficially anonymous, but it’s not clear how well they’d stand up to law enforcement.

Instead of a cryptographic algorithm, MintChip security will be based on trusted hardware. Using hardware means that the system is not just decentralized but distributed and can be used with no Internet connection (although that’s becoming less of a problem any day). The hardware will be hackable by someone with sufficient resources. The government is used to policing paper counterfeiting, but it will likely be impossible to trace counterfeit MintChips to their source.

Although MintChips appear to be a competitor to BitCoins, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason for a BitCoin early adopter to switch. Instead, MintChips are probably competition for credit card companies, PayPal and iTunes. The transaction fees charged by those companies add friction to the economy, so the Mint is fulfilling its mandate to make the economy more efficient. Plus, instead of those companies getting transaction fees, the Mint will make money selling MintChip hardware.

MintChips won’t have chargebacks, which vendors will like, and they’ll be accessible to more people than credit cards. The mathematics behind BitCoins are too complicated for almost anyone to verify (although complexity doesn’t seem to stop anybody from accepting fractional reserve banking) and there are a number of doomsday scenarios since BitCoins seem too good to be true. With the backing of the Canadian Mint, far more people will trust MintChips.

Just like the market for Canadian dollars is built on the group of people who believe that dollars are valid currency, the market for BitCoins is built around a distributed network of computers that “believe” in BitCoins. Each transaction, including minting new coins, requires the network to do heavy algorithmic calculations. The network is immune to attack by any group of malicious processors that is less powerful than the good group. The algorithm stops producing new coins once there are 21 million in circulation, so inflation will stop.

BitCoins themselves have no id, like the serial number on a bill. Instead, the transactions have cryptographic proofs. So you can verify that Alice gave 100 coins to Bob, but then Bob can change his name to Bruce and give 50 coins to Carol. Carol can determine that Bruce has 50 coins but not where they came from. Bruce can’t then give 75 coins to Dave because he can’t prove that he has that many – BitCoins are immune to the double-spending problem.

Like items in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, BitCoins can be converted to and from real world currencies. BitCoins are of interest for tax evasion, including the tax called inflation collected by fractional reserve banking. At the moment their killer app is buying drugs online, but an untaxable currency holds a lot of potential.

Although they are cryptographically secure, the BitCoin market is probably susceptible to a coordinated political attack like the one that crippled WikiLeaks. Because they’re non-inflationary, there is a concern that people may stop spending them once their value is guaranteed to increase relative to inflationary currency. Because the market is small and unregulated, they may also be susceptible to market manipulation.

Although the article is written from a US perspective, he mentions that this phenomenon is widespread in Western Europe. It’s obviously happening in Canada too, where health care is our government’s biggest expenditure (how many days did you spend in the hospital this year compared to your grandparents?).

It’s particularly insidious that, while Baby Boomers have had to support their adult children with housing and small financial assistance, they’ve managed to avoid paying most of their tuition, meaning student loan debt is a cost that society will still be paying off after they’re dead.

Marche doesn’t discuss the cost of real estate: Baby Boomers bought houses and then voted for policies that would keep supply growing slower than demand to increase the value of their houses. He also doesn’t discuss the environmental externalities that were produced and the irreplaceable natural resources that were consumed in the unsustainable generation of Boomer wealth.

Marche implies that the Occupation Movement wasn’t embraced by many Baby Boomers was because, although their wealth has stagnated relative to the 1%, they’ve built a society that will do a reasonably good job of supporting them until they die. Dismantling that system is simply too risky at their age.

Throughout history large numbers of unemployed youth have been responsible for revolutions. The next stage of the Occupation may not bother trying to find common ground with the 25% of the population that hold 80% of the wealth.

I voted online in the NDP’s leadership election. As the media has reported, the election server(s) were the target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and it took a lot of effort to get though to vote in later rounds. The NDP contracted the Internet voting to the Spanish company Scytl, which has also been selected as one of two preferred suppliers for the US Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act.

Obviously they should have run the election on cloud servers, such as Amazon’s or Google’s. Voting needs a high capacity for a single day and cloud servers are resistant to DDoS attacks. But there are other issues with the election web app that made it more vulnerable to DDoS:

Scytl’s voting app was not integrated into the NDP’s site. The voting web app used an HTTP session that frequently timed out. HTTPS has authentication sessions built into the protocol so I can’t imagine why they’d build an HTTP session on top of that for such a simple web app. Not using a session would have made the site more resistant to DDoS attacks.

Voting was authenticated by both a randomly-assigned ID and password. Since I was trying to vote on a smartphone (which was promoted in the voting material), I had to flip back & forth twice to copy & paste those strings – there’s no added security from having two secrets. The app stepped through logging in, receiving the options and then confirming your choice. A single-page form with input for password and ballot choice would have been more usable on a smartphone and resistant to DDoS attacks.

After each vote I was given a hash of my vote and a cryptographic “control code” (I’m guessing this is the hash signed by Scytl’s public key) so that I can verify that my vote was counted, but I can’t find the vote list now that the election is complete.

My conclusion is that Scytl is not competent enough to run an election, and if they’re one of the most competent online voting providers then the world isn’t ready for online voting.

Participants to the event are not allowed to run after the water trucks which are clearly marked non-potable. Participants are given notice that the water in the trucks is non-potable and could result in an illness (BRC 2011b). Participants do frequently run after vehicles and are sprayed by the water trucks. Contaminants found in the Fly Ranch water source above the maximum contaminant level for drinking water include E. coli, fluoride, antimony, and arsenic all of which can result in potential health effects from long-term exposure. – s3.2.1

The [Summit Lake Paiute Tribe] believes the land needs to ‘heal’ after the Burning Man festival. The tribe suggested that the event should alternate between the playa and a more distant location, such as just north of Empire or Cedarville, or closer to the Burning Man Ranch near Hualapai. – s4.8

Additionally, as the event continues, there is a likelihood that at some time during the life of the event a natural or man-made emergency would require evacuation of the event. Weather related emergencies are the most likely event. While the average rainfall in August and September, 0.25 inches, is unlikely to result in standing water, it would impede event participants from leaving the playa. Higher precipitation amounts could occur on a limited basis and could result in standing rainfall leaving the event goers stranded for longer periods of time. – s4.16.1

For those who support Burning Man as an opportunity to create a temporary community outside of conventional society, an increase in participation would largely be viewed as giving others the opportunity to participate in this experience (Aspen 2011). Non-participants opposed to Burning Man and its associated activities for moral and ethical reasons would likely become more resolved in their opposition to the event. Participants and former participants critical of Burning Man would be likely to see growth of the event as increasingly reflecting mainstream society and dilution of its countercultural aspects. Other participants or former participants could view this in a positive light, seeing the growth as the popularization of Burning Man’s principles among the public: instead of Burning Man increasingly reflecting conventional society, conventional society’s increasing reflection of Burning Man’s principles. – s4.18.1

It is anticipated that just as Burning Man participation has grown since its inception, demand for Burning Man, or Burning Man-like events would continue to grow, regardless of capping the population at 50,000 people. Consequently, it is expected that participation in regional events would increase. Over 40 regional Burning Man-related or Burning Man-like events are held by other groups and organizations worldwide (BRC 2011). While the effects in the assessment area would remain the same, all of the effects described above would increase at the location of regional events. – s4.18.2

• A variable cap of 58,000 to 70,000 attendees, adjusted yearly by the Bureau
• Maintaining the cap at 50,000
• Telling BMORG to do it somewhere else

One of the main issues with expanding the event is transportation on and off the playa along the 2-lane roads from Wadsworth:

The Bureau has calculated that if the event goes over 65,400 people, the highway will drop to a level of service of E during Exodus, which is the level immediately above gridlock. Disturbingly, the Bureau has noted that carpooling has decreased over time, from 0.95 automobile trips/guest in 2009 to 1.2 trips/guest in 2011.

BMORG didn’t propose a solution to the traffic problem in their submission. The Bureau proposed a few but the Assessment doesn’t recommend any of them:

• Extending the Exodus period
• Implementing a system that requires participants to sign up for an exit time
• Incentivizing carpooling so there are more participants per vehicle

Exodus “pulsing” was implemented last year, where cars are allowed out in staggered groups. More complicated solutions have been proposed in the past, from waiting lots (this is how entry to Shambhala works) to an exit lottery. I think the best solution is mass transit: parking individual cars in Wadsworth and using buses to transport people and trucks to transport gear. The logistics of that are obviously immense but, hell, in World War I they built temporary railways.