Jared pointed me to this Times Colonist letter, which suggests that Victoria needs to critically examine our zoning policies with respect to parking. In the letter, they talk a lot about urban sprawl, and various other, relatively boring outcomes of strong parking requirements for new development in urban centers. I think a much simpler comparison might have more impact: LA has similar policies to Victoria, San Francisco and NYC do not.

Freakonomics did a big series on misconceptions about LA, and why downtown LA has a reputation for sprawling, whereas downtown San Francisco is considered “vibrant”. The most interesting thing they linked to was this study on the true costs of parking in LA.

Hog farmers want to get a bailout? Actually, this article is so poorly written, even that much isn’t clear. They definitely want something.

My understanding of the deal in Canada is that hog farming has been a bit of a speculation business for the last 10 years. So now that waaay too many people have entered the market, it has caused a crash. Notice how this has nothing to do with the economy?

Here’s the problem with the journalism here:

So is this blog post about retarded journalism, greedy farmers, or crappy government that has set up this needyness? TO be determined at a later date….

This afternoon I rowed down the gorge to glo on Jutland (warning: the website makes awful noise).

The first thing that strikes me about a restaurant is the approach, the grounds, the exterior. glo is surrounded by great public walkways, great public sculpture, and overflowing public trash cans.

I anticipate the excuse, “picking up garbage is the city’s job!” Well, the government is ruining your restaurant: Stop making excuses and busk the cans into your dumpsters.

I love the space glo is in, and hate the hip hop blasting over the front door. I’m a giant hip hop fan, but when the music is so loud it’s fuzzing your speakers you are doing it wrong.

I’d add something in the long entrance hallway as well, video screens or similar. The corridor is perfectly designed for busy waiting — don’t bore the people lining up to give you money. That said, my party was immediately seated on the patio on a sunny, beautiful, busy day.

The interior was almost empty, except for delivered cases of kitchen supplies which hadn’t been properly received littering the tables.

We were seated outside under pleasant shade, which is a neat trick. I’ve been red for a few days, first from the beach, second from a patio with poor brolly shades. Worse, however, are those patios that are over-shaded and get no sun. glo achieved a nice balance.

Then we got our menus.

Laminated, dilapidated menus with no graphic design didn’t fit the quality the rest of the establishment was aiming for. This is basic stuff: Use heavy paper with a standard design, possibly a cover, and reprint and recycle as needed.

Edifice: 2 of 5.

Our server introduced herself and recorded our drinks. My new trick has been to ask for an Arnold Palmer, which seems beyond most Victoria bartenders. She repeated the order and I could tell she had no idea what I wanted.

The server returned with an iced tea, coffee, and a question for me: “Okay, we’ve had a discussion. Some of us think an Arnold Palmer is a light beer with a shot, some of us think it’s iced tea with a shot. Which is it?”

Fail.

I changed my order — they didn’t have lemonade — and ended up waiting an unreasonable amount of time. The tea eventually showed up with a round of waters, nicely sweetened. Lots of iced tea in Victoria is over-sweet, which is confusing because Americans, our main tourist demographic, drink the stuff sugar-free.

The drink service foreshadowed the food: slow, and not quite right. The medium-rare steak in my party came medium, and our eggs benny had clearly spent some time under a hot lamp. Not only that but the English muffin — which the server called an “English McMuffin” — was burnt.

I had a chorizo goat cheese omelet with spinach, mushrooms, diced tomatoes, and disgustingly overcooked eggs: scorched rubber. The flavors and textures would have worked had the dish been properly cooked — one side effect of the excessive heat was to string out the spinach.

These cooking problems were all a symptoms of an overly-busy kitchen. Obviously a steak order takes time, and when you’re busy it might go out a touch over-done (and should then be sent back). Omelets and poached eggs take minutes, or seconds, to cook and should be done last. Even a busy person has enough time to send omelets back until they’re right.

The egg dishes tasted like they’d been started with the steak and then kept warm — unacceptable. Here’s how to properly scramble eggs, imagine your way to a properly cooked omelet from here:

None of the tables around us got food in a timely fashion. glo’s kitchen is either under-staffed, under-experienced, under-motivated, or under-skilled. Or maybe some combination thereof.

The food was served without an eye to presentation, which is disappointing because most of the dishes I saw on other tables were presented with a pseduo-haute flair.

Service: 1 of 5.

glo feels more than informal — it feels too relaxed, like the difference between a sweater and a sweatshirt.

The patio’s bamboo shades had been trimmed into uselessness and then left in place. The planters blocked isles and bottlenecked traffic. They’d been useless long enough that waiters were stepping over the boxes — so why even have them?

Combined with the trash cans, the tatty menus, the entryway speaker-fuzz, and the unstowed cooking supplies, the unthinking arrangement of the bamboo planters gave the place the feel of a restaurant without a manager. Or maybe with a tasteless one. In either case, that lack of care was reflected in the food.

That said, the space is great and the “hard” aspects of the design — those that are more resistant to a lack of care, like the building and internal fixtures — work well. And being in Victoria on a sunny day is pleasurable by default.

Ambiance: 2 of 5.

Overall, glo is fine for a relaxed time out. I feel as though I’ve panned it more than it deserves, like a nice-but-stupid dog you keep having to choke. Let’s put this review in the context of the reviews I haven’t written yet: glo is above-average for its class in Victoria.

But with a little discipline it could be so much more. It just feels unmanaged — no consistent vision, no steady hand.

Final: 2 of 5.

When an economy is expanding there is a risk of increased inflation. The central bank for each currency can slow down inflation by destroying [electronic] money (the media calls this “raising the interest rate” although that’s not how it actually works).

When an economy is shrinking (or, more commonly, not expanding at a sustainable rate), one way to counter that is for the central bank to cause inflationary pressure by creating [electronic] money (“lowering the interest rate”). This doesn’t work perfectly, not least because there’s nothing stopping the commercial banks from taking the created money out of the market and giving it to their shareholders (“not passing the interest rate on”).

An alternative is to stimulate the economy by cutting taxes. But it is politically difficult to raise taxes when the economy has recovered. This leads to eternal government deficits or a continually shrinking government: neoconservative governments have been accused of cutting taxes at unaffordable rates in order to “choke” governments of revenue.

Another problem with using the money supply as the sole lever of the economy is that many currencies cover diverse economies. For example, a high Canadian dollar hurts Ontario manufacturing while benefitting Alberta oil exports – the Euro is even worse.

I had a flash of insight the other day: governments should stop messing with the money supply and switch to controlling the economy with taxes. To slow the economy down, jack taxes up. To stimulate the economy, cut taxes and get voters used to the idea that it’s a temporary measure.

Almost exactly as this idea was occurring to me, Conrad Black was writing a column proposing the same thing (skip past all the nonsense about fighting poverty with wealth taxes). And it turns out that this has been a core idea in Keynesianism all along! (The current economic downturn is not so much about the end of capitalism as it’s the booting of neoclassical economics out of the Neoclassical Synthesis.)