All my progressive friends are up in arms because the Conservative government is shutting down the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. This is a Crown corporation that commissions research on sustainable development and reports to the Minister of Environment.

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.

Saw this on the way home. You’ll have to invert your device…

The Canadian Mint recently declared that they can do better than BitCoins:

“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.

Here’s Mulcair talking to Mansbridge last night, including a clear strategic goal of reaching out to farmers again as part of widening the base of the New Left:

Mulcair’s got great screen presence, great spin control, and a great pitch for hope in the New Left. Last night I watched Living in the End Times According to Slavoj Zizek. Push through, it’s mostly in English, and argues for a radial rethinking of the Left in the West to combat the international rise of authoritarian capitalism (which can be much more efficient than democratic capitalism):

Now that we have C10 watch for full jails, more jails, new jails, happy police and screw unions, unhappy judges and prosecutors, and increased incarceration of people under the age of 30. Watch, also, as the Hell’s Angels give no fuck and keep making money.

This, of course, is no accident but rather the Tories’ actual agenda.

In related news, see the sour watermelons in our tumblr feed (via a buddy who was just down South for GDC). Reports indicate that California cannabis is not to be fucked with. This is yet another market the Conservatives are fucking us on (the first was our first-mover advantage in green tech).

Big honking government: bad for beeswax.

This. The idea is to flood Vic’s Twitter with innocent self revelations tagged #TellVicEverything — y’know, because he just wants to know. There’s also some kind of FOIPA request out for all of the URLs accessed on all of Vic’s internet-enabled devices, which’ll take about 40 days to be processed. Vikileaks, a Twitter account that blast[s/ed] tidbits from the public records of Vic’s messy divorce hasn’t turned out to be as juicy as I hoped [see meme]: he’s a cunt, sure, but mostly comes off as a dull brute — which I guess you’d have to be to seriously suggest that your political opponents are child pornographers.

You know who else hated child pornographers? The Nazis. You know what that makes Vic? An idiot.

Via BB, here’s Jesse Brown — who has held some opinions I don’t like — interviewing a Canadian civlib warrior, who I’ve never heard of, and ARGH WHATEVER I CAN’T DO POLITICS. it’s too frustrating

… in an alley near my work:

(via BB)

I’ve been thinking recently: is there some way to just ignore national-level retardation? That government monopoly on violence is a bitch — you can get away with ignoring them for a long time, but eventually they’ll throw you in prison for not paying taxes, doing yoga with the wrong kind of incense, or reading dissenting opinions on the internet like you are now.

Eventually you’d need your own police force, which is essentially just a gang, and then things would get truly violent. Probably best to just do the Ghandi thing: let them wail on you with clubs while you scrape salt from the rocks, smiling all the while.

Presumably Toews would support an amendment restricting surveillance to child pornographers, then? I mean, they’re obviously the only real concern.

There is some shit going down, but I’m not getting involved because I’m trying to focus on staying calm.

I’m a working digital artist though, and copyright law seems to hurt more than it helps.

I’ve written before about Canada Post. Well, silly me, I trusted them again.

I’ve been stymied on a video project for a while and one of my friends agreed to help me finish it. I needed to send him 100 gigs of footage, so I cleared off one of my terabyte drives and packed it up. My studio is equidistant from a UPS store and a Canada Post outlet. I picked the wrong one.

I paid for insurance. I paid for guaranteed delivery. I was promised it would arrive last Thursday — and I double-checked this because I’m under time pressure. Today, Tuesday, it arrived… AT MY HOUSE IN TORONTO. They gave themselves a five day extension and then did it wrong anyway: CLUSTERFAIL.

This is a truly monstrous waste of taxpayer dollars. I would probably be even more upset if I paid taxes.

Naomi Klein claimed, in The Shock Doctrine, that the Right’s modus operandi is to wait for disasters and then use them as causi belli (forgive my probably-wrong Latin pluralization) to execute their agenda. Well, here’s a freebie: our economy is SHRINKING — there aren’t enough resources to go around — let’s stop delivering post in, say, the GTA. Just for a week.

I predict that people won’t notice, let alone care. If they do, either, just restart it.

But imagine: a whole week of not killing trees for paper-based spam, not having our identities and belongings stolen, and having packages delivered TO THEIR RECIPIENTS (I can’t stress this point enough — it’s really the whole key to “delivery”, as a concept, and I’m willing to pay extra for it)… Oh, what a magical land of joy our fair city might become.

And once that experiment is successful we could roll it out to the whole nation:

Seriously, though: I would rather Harper just keep the entire postal budget for himself. The money would do me just as much good, but he’d retire from politics. Maybe he could split it with Ford.

[UPDATE: THEY BILLED US EXTRA TO TAKE DELIVERY AT THE WRONG LOCATION.]