Pie Palace

Originally written on March 14, 2005. Posting delayed until the by-election ended.
It’s an odd feeling being involved in a political party. Every decision we make has to be considered with a great deal of deliberation. For example, there’s a by-election going on in a local riding, and I’m not overly excited about one item on the candidate’s chosen platform. The issue that raises my eyebrow is his property rights point.

In terms of property rights, he says:

Property rights – Without harming our environment, I believe that property owners should have the right to do with their land what they please, and the government should not interfere.

That’s a classic rural/urban split. What someone does with their land has a huge impact on their next-door neighbour. If my neighbour decides to build a pig farm, it lowers my quality of life (due to stink and lowered property values). Having said that, I agree that not every heritage building is worth saving, nor is every collapsing barn worth propping up.

This raises the question, how do I voice my disagreement? We’re a decentralized party, and we encourage our candidates to build up a local platform. How do I voice my (slight) disagreement during the election? I guess the answer is simple: if I’ve waited until the election, it’s too late. If the candidate is contradicting party policy, then I’m free to cut him off (ie, my riding can say that we aren’t going to do anything to help the guy). If the candidate is staying within party lines, it’s my responsibility to support him. In this case, he’s within party lines. Of the 15 or so platform points, I agree with all but one of them.

I’ve made two badges for Green Bloggers. They’re a semi-standard size, and you’ll notice that I’m using one of them at the bottom of the page, because I’m on the GB blogroll.

I’ve also joined the Progressive Bloggers, but they generate a much larger volume of text, so I doubt that many people will see my words of wisdom.

The Green Party has announced the start of the leadership race. So far, I’ve only heard about one candidate: David Chernushenko. I’ve worked with David on two election campaigns, and numerous executive meetings for our local riding association. I trust him to lead the party, and I trust him to lead Canada (once he’s elected, of course, I strongly discourage armed revolutions, no matter who they put in power).

The question now arises: who else will enter the race? Word on the street is that the current leader, Jim Harris, probably won’t run again, so long as it looks like competent folk are entering the race. I’ve made my predictions, but it looks like David is all by his lonesome on Day 1.

Ooo! The CBC even covered David’s entry into the race!

While lying on the couch with my Lovely a couple of nights ago, I made the mistake of trying to make conversation.

Me: “It’s funny, since the snow melted, it’s like the Empty Fairy has been replacing all of the undergrads’ empty beer bottles with skate boards.”
Her: “If you wait until your birthday the Empty Fairy might get you a skateboard too.”
Me: “But I don’t want a skateboard!”
Her: “You keep mentioning them!”
Me: “But I don’t want one! The idea of skating on road with cars scares me.”
Her: “When we were out west, you spent a whole afternoon in a skatepark.”
Me: “Yeah, because they guy who drove me there took off for three hours. I spent three hours in a skatepark with a board that was too small, wearing safety pads designed for a 6-year old.”
Her: “Then I’ll get you a long board.”
Me: “But I don’t want a long board! I don’t have anywhere to ride it!”
Her: “We could go to the experimental farm.”
Me: “Are you getting one too?”
Her: “I was going to.”
Me: “Well, I guess that’s okay then…”

So, by womanly fiat, it looks like I’m going to have to start wearing even scruffier clothes, and start smoking weed. Which will probably improve my outlook on life, but I doubt it’ll help my chances with getting a job.

Do you like zombies? Do you like pixel-art? Do you like anime stylings? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then you need to take a look at Paul Robertson’s blog and deviantART gallery. The guy makes fantastic animated GIFs of anime-styled zombies.

This guy really needs to team up with a programmer to make a game…

The Washington Post has a great comparison of the legislative controls on a Las Vegas slot machine, compared to the controls on electronic voting machines in the states. The comparison can be found here. (Courtesy of Section 15)

Word on the street is that the Green Party will be announcing its leadership race some time in the next week. The current party leader, Jim Harris, did a great job at taking the party from the political wilderness, and turning it into something resembling a main-stream political party. Jim’s vision was a Green Party able to stand on its own two feet, and operate as a successful, self-sustaining organization. He made that vision reality.

Now it’s time to elect someone who has a vision for Canada. Someone who can represent our party on the national leadership debates, speak about our policy knowledgeably, and show Canadians that Greens are about a whole lot more than “just” the environment. I’ve worked long and hard with one great candidate for that role. But regardless of who wins, our party needs to do a few things in the new leader’s coming term.

1. Stop talking about the environment. Yep. That’s right. You heard me. Greens talking about the environment is old news. It’s like old people talking about bodily functions, or frat boys talking about sports: it’s expected, boring, and kind of clichéd. We need to make like the Conservatives (yech), pick four or five points, and hammer ‘em home. Preferably points that are hot in the media: healthcare, foreign policy, etc.
   
2. Provide a strong alternate vision for healthcare. Every developed country is suffering under the load of growing healthcare costs. We need to start looking into efficient mechanisms to reduce those costs, while improving delivery. I’m not talking privatization. Then we need to start exporting those techniques.
   
3. Start funding think tanks. Canadian Greens cite the Polaris Institute fairly often. It’s pretty Green, but they don’t officially associate with us, and we don’t officially associate with them. That’s fine. But we need more sources of research and ideas. The Green Party has to start funding and promoting think tanks that promote and explore our ideology. We need to make sure that those institutes are credible enough that they can make their way into the mainstream press. Our ideas are palatable to a vast majority of Canadians, we just need to show those Canadians that we deserve their votes at the polls.
   
4. Committees are a necessary (if unsexy) part of Party life. We need more standing committees. We need a standing Policy Convention Committee, to make sure that our policy conventions are planned more than six months in advance. We need a standing Policy Committee (with at least one fulltime employee) to promote policy work within the party, to hire and administer interns, and to co-ordinate policy development across the country. Just as important: we need to start working hard on getting proportional representation into the big list o’ issues that Canadians are thinking about; so I propose a Standing Committee to Promote Democratic Reform. We need a standing committee on outreach, and party development.
   
5. We need to start nailing the unholy alliance of the CBC and CTV to make sure that we get onto the next leadership debate. We need to be there. Now is the time to start bothering those unelected sots who decide what the electorate get to see. Not just through the usual means of court cases and petitions. A few thoughtful folks have talked about showing up at the CRTC hearings and complaining that the CBC isn’t doing its job (more for the media spectacle than to seriously have a license revoked).
   
6. We need to start talking to people who aren’t upper middle class, university educated, and white. Those people really like us, but we need to start talking to folks who don’t traditionally vote Green. Starting thinking lower incomes. Starting thinking about what we can do to engage those folks, and to get them involved. The idea isn’t to make everyone an environmentalist, it’s to reframe our everyday problems in terms of sustainability, and to explore long term solutions to the problems Green haven’t traditionally tackled: healthcare, integration of immigrants, public transit, property laws, and banking laws to name but a few.

And now some predictions: 6/10 chance that Elizibeth May will run for leader – she’s been itching to make her political debut for a few years, but if she wins, expect two years of nothing but the environment and a slip in the polls for the Greens. 7/10 chance that David Chernushenko will run – he has the natural charisma and integrity that a party leader needs, and the support of many long-term volunteers. 9/10 chance that a deep hippy will run, saying that we should get back to our roots and ignore this mainstream crap, should he win, you’ll never hear about the Greens again. 4/10 chance that Jim Harris will run: he’s seen that the party doesn’t need him, and that it’s time for him to retire to the roll he’s good at: fundraising.

Update: I added a mention of a democratic reform committee to the list of committees we need to see.

Okay programmers, wrap your head around this. According to Ontario tax laws, certain portions of the software development/deployment cycle are taxable, and others are not. In Ontario, there is no sales tax on:

• Training or advising users of a computer program
  
• Managing data
  
• Planning the development process (including gathering specs)
  
• Testing software

But the following services are taxable:

• Installing or configuring software,
  
• Modifying software,
  
• Maintaining software

BUT! And here’s the big but:

RST applies to all modifications of a taxable computer program until the accumulated invoices (billings) for the modifications exceed the price of the original computer program (i.e., initial licence). The resulting modified program is then considered to be a custom computer program and any additional services will be exempt from RST.

Note that development is not specified anywhere in there. Project planning, and maintenance cover two parts of the development cycle, but the initial creation of source code isn’t specified.

I would argue that these rules are too complex for a small company to deal with. If I’m developing software for a small company, that doesn’t have a well-defined spec, where do I draw the line between planning the original software (non-taxable) and working on the next iteration (taxable)?

Astute readers will have noticed that the phrase “custom software” was used above. What’s custom software? Well, a slim little backgrounder document defines it as anything that cannot be described by the following:

• the program is designed and developed for the use of more than one person
  
• it is created using pre-written modules, unless the source code of the program is extensively modified
  
• the intent at the time of development is to resell the computer program to others (e.g., the developer retains the rights to the new program for subsequent resale purposes)
  
• it is designed for a specific industry and sold to several purchasers
  
• the same core program is used to develop a program for each customer, and only minor modifications are made to that program
  
• the program is developed for the use of several related subsidiaries (separate legal entities).

Where does this leave open source software? Say that I’m working on an spen source project. It’s designed for use by multiple people, but I have no intent to resell it (in fact, I’m going to give the source away for free). In a situation like that, I’m just charging for my time¹. According to the rules listed above, that seems to suggest that the developer doesn’t have to charge any RST/PST.

So the moral of the story seems to be: if you design for reuse, then it’s probably taxable. If you’re writing one-off stuff, it doesn’t sound taxable. I think. Which suggests that the time spent developing software is taxable, if you’re going to sell those portions to others. Yech. Which suggests that consultants needs to be very mindful of time they spend developing different components.

Damn you, Ontario. Damn you.

---

1. The business model of just charging for time sucks. It sucks ass. It makes it really hard to make a reasonable amount of money, and it means that you have to charge higher rates to cover the time spent looking for new contracts. As much as I beleive in the idea of open source, this model seems to condemn the developer to charging high fees, and constant digging for new contracts. Then again, there are people who like doing those things. I’m just not one of them.

I just ran into a link to Box.net which is a free file storage site. You can sign up and get 1GB of storage for free. Or pay money to get 5GB of storage. The nifty thing about it is that they’re publishing an API. The question arises: will they stay in business long enough to get bought out?

Considering that I was fearing data-loss last night, and copied a bunch of crap from one of my machines to the other, this could be a handy offsite storage solution. Does anyone know of a decent linux back-up tool that could be hooked to use this service?

Leave it to the Gernmans to create machinima pr0n with World of Warcraft. They’ve created a three minute video of a humourously Teutonic mesh getting it one with a midget in pigtails. I haven’t seen much in the way of machinima, but whoever put this together did a surprisingly good (read: “not half as bad as I expected”) job at it.

I’m not quite sure why, but this video makes me feel weirdly uncomfortable. I’m not sure if it’s the uncanny valley, or the image of some sweaty blond guy spending hours to get this just right…