Pie Palace

This just seems weird. There’s a photography “hunt” in Ottawa on August 27 being organized by City Hunt. It looks like a four-hour contest to take lots of photos, and then submit the resulting bytes to be judged. The idea sounds like fun. But the cost is a little high: $20/person (I think). The weird part is that (1) there is little or no explanation of image ownership on the City Hunt, (2) the don’t want the best photo from each photog, it sounds like they want all photos from each photog, and (3) it “happens” to be going on at the same time as a stock photography company is trying to get people to take stock photos.

I’m sure it’s on the up-and-up, but it sorta sounds like a scam.

The Mazu Kan “fighting” kit at ThinkGeek is dorktastic. It looks like it would be boatloads of fun (with just an edge of humiliation).

The following is a response to Devon Rowcliffe’s posting about the seal hunt on I Didn’t Get Where I Am Today. Sadly, his comments form didn’t want to accept my thoughts, so I shall subject you to them instead, dear reader:

I agree with your perspective: we should treat all animals equally. Singling out seals for better treatment than cows, chickens, pigs, or any other food livestock ignores the suffering of those creatures. The science policy I worked on in 2004 had a very similar bent. Looking at the GPC platform on animal welfare we don’t see much. The only solid indication of actually policy is that the Green Party supports bill C-50 (which apparently strengthens existing animal cruelty laws).

If we accept that seal hunting is a contentious issue, then I don’t think that such an approach would really work. Folks that I know like the idea of animals being treated fairly, but would rather not think of the food on their plate as having suffered. Essentially, they prefer to think that food on their plate led a pretty decent life, and died quickly and painlessly (if they are willing to think of their food as having been an animal). Unless some organization works to highlight the cruelties that exist in large-scale farming, I don’t think that most of the electorate would accept that connection.

I’m not sure if a majority of the electorate thinks of the seal hunt as a contentious issue. In my group of friends, most people don’t think of the hunt as an important issue. I suspect that there is a vocal minority that thinks of it as an issue.

From Taking Your Camera on the Road

To train your cat to respond to its name, do not leave food out all day long. Have feeding times. Make a noise or indication that food is arriving and call the cat’s name at the same time. Do this for each feeding time every day consistently. Within a day or so, call the cat’s name before you rattle the food or start the can opener. Within a week or less, the cat will soon respond to its name not just the sound of food.

When you play with the cat, call it by name. Begin to call the cat to you outside of the kitchen or feeding area, showing love and affection and a reward for their prompt arrival. When you open the door coming home, call the cat’s name to make sure it comes to you, whether it is outside or in. This reinforces the “greeting” call and encourages the cat to respond to your appearance as well. Within a very short time, even if your cat is an adult, he or she will respond to their name.

I guess it’s possible. But I have a hard time beleiving it.

Aside from occasional gadget lust, I’m not a huge fan of The Little White Behemoth, but two stories about allegations of poor working conditions in Apple’s factories did catch my eye. Boing Boing and Gizmodo both pointed to a 3rd party audit of working conditions in Apple’s factories. The response? Apple’s workers are treated reasonably well, although they work too much overtime.

Congratulations to Apple for running the audit. Let’s hope they follow the recommendations.

I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t done a great deal of research about our mayoral candidates, but I saw Alex Munter speak in May, and I was very impressed with his perspective. Today, I received an email from his campaign outlining what he thinks should be done with Ottawa’s waste, specifically, the Carp/Navan Road expansion.

From his press release:

Munter’s cost-neutral Six Point Plan to Achieve 60% Waste Diversion will divert sixty percent of Ottawa’s waste from landfills by increasing recycling, introducing organic waste collection for both residents and businesses, and making better use of new and emerging technologies.

Essentially, he’s suggesting a 60% waste diversion by 2012. As far as I can tell, that means ramping up the recycling programs, and implementing a municipal composting program. Which rawks.¹ There are more details in the backgrounder.

1. Of course, the correct way of dealing with the waste problem is to create disincentives on manufacturers for creating products which produce waste in the first place, but that’s a little off topic. (back)

Rona Ambrose, Canada’s environment minister, said that BC’s spotted owl “does not currently face imminent threats to its survival,” despite the fact there are 17 of them left in the wild (ten years ago there were 100). It’s one thing to say that the federal government won’t do anything to protect the critter, but to say that it doesn’t face a threat is disingenuous.

Howard Kunstler will be speaking in Ottawa on September 22nd. I read Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere and was quite impressed with his writing and ideas. The follow-on, Home from Nowhere, didn’t really do much for me.

In any case, I’ll probably be paying the $10 to see Kunstler rant. The show starts at 7:00pm at Adult High School at 300 Rochester Street.

Today the press was awash with news that the Ontario government will be reviewing how municipal services are financed and delivered. The review is slated to take 18 months, will probably deal with municipal delivery of health, housing, and social services. The long timeline means that it will end after the upcoming municipal and provincial elections.

The review is a good idea. The timing of the upcoming provincial election means that even a shorter review wouldn’t have a chance to be implemented anyway, so there isn’t much of a difference. The Tory budget cuts of the 1990s downloaded many responsibilities onto municipalities, since then, there does not seem to have been a great deal of research (by the government) on ways to improve the situation.

My only disappointment is that the review will not cover taxation issues. Currently, in Ottawa, the city pays for about 30% of the services in question. Since the city pays for it, and the city is financed by property taxes, that’s the same as saying that 30% of the cost of provincial services comes out of property taxes. According to the provincial Conservatives, no other province uses property taxes to fund services that should be delivered by the province (and whose fault is that, Mr. Tory?).

Sadly, the Green Party of Ontario hasn’t gotten a press release out on the subject. I don’t know what it will say, but I hope it would be something on the lines of:

1. Property taxes are a bad way to finance any kind of service. They should be replaced with income tax, and (possibly) a special tax on the sale of property.
   
2. Municipalities should be able to levy their own taxes, either on income or sales.
   
3. For services that incur a cost for every municipal resident, such as water treatment, and sewage treatment, users should pay based on use. For service costs that are based on the location of a residence (such as road maintenance, water delivery, or sewar maintenance), residences should be charged based on the amount of infrastructure necessary to get their cars/water/crap from point A to point B.
   
4. To help pay for the cost of public transit, residents of houses that are poorly served by public transit should have to pay more for road maintenance.

In my mind, the taxes/fees that people pay should be based on their use, and based on the needs of others. If we directly tie the use of some finite resource to the cost of using it, people are more likely to be careful about its use. There are many services (such as social housing and community health) that are fundamentally helpful to society – as such, they should be paid for out of income taxes, and other mechanisms that are based on someone’s ability to pay.

The sitting opposition parties did their usual dance of rage. The Conservative critic (local MPP Lisa MacLeod) complained that the duration of the study was too long, and that examining the problem is a stand-in for raising the transfer payments to municipalities. The NDP critic complained that considering possible solutions is evidence that the current government doesn’t have a solution of its own. Great job. Way to offer alternative an vision.

Remember those Liberal commercials during the last election? “If the Conservatives win, there will be soldiers in our cities. Soldiers! In our cities! With guns! Guns!” Well, it turns out that was a best case scenario. Now there is a botox clinic in Ottawa. BOTOX! In OTTAWA! I’d rather make do with the police state, given the option…