And sometimes it just sits there. Other times Ottawa flings pooh. If you’re feeling chatty, the City of Ottawa is running a public consultation on http://ottawa.econsultation.ca. The discussions look interesting, ranging from encouraging intensification to improvement on the transit system.

Continuing on the economic theme, two stripping-related articles recently caught my attention:

• Strip clubs in the US have started giving change in two dollar bills. The practice is common enough in the Dallas Fort Worth area that a pocket full of two dollar bills is now associated with strip clubs, meaning that punters try to get rid of the twos before leaving the club, resulting in higher tips and more money spent. (from $pread magazine via Utne Reader)
• A study of lap dancers (in strip clubs, not Lapland) shows that their earnings per shift varies with their fertility. The more fertile they are, the more they make. It’s unknown if the customers directly sense estrus, or if the dancer behaves differently. (from New Scientist)

In which our author reminds his readers how to downgrade Sun’s Java on Ubuntu 7.04.

The Canadian dollar has recently reached par with the US dollar. There was much hullabaloo in the Canadian press about the dollar’s growing strength. Being a bit of curmudgeon, I decided to check the historic value of the loonie. I was a little

The Data

Videe Figure 1: Various currencies expressed in terms of the Canadian dollar. The Austrian dollar bubbles around C$1, the euro does the same around C$1.50, and the pound hangs out around C$2.25 (the yen, scaled up 50 times is equally static). Meanwhile, the greenback spends 1997-2003 at about C$1.50, until the start of 2003, when it starts a slow downward slide from C$1.50 to its current value.

Now turn your gaze to Figure 2: The US dollar’s rate from October 1985 to mid-October 2007. A gradual fall from early ‘85, turning around at the start of ‘92, and gradually increasing until about 2003, at which point it slumps to the current value.

Data acquired from the Bank of Canada and OANDA. All rates are interbank rates. Data and scripts used to generate graphs are available for download.

Conclusions

1. The Canadian dollar is not increasing in value – the yardstick we measure it against is gradually shrinking.
2. While the four currencies shown in Figure 1 seem to be holding their value, the US dollar has lost 30% of its value since 2003.
3. For some reason, 2003 seems like a particularly bad year for the US. I wonder what epic screw-up started then and is continuing into the present day?

Blogawa.ca is welcomes two new bloggers to its blogroll: David Schrimshaw and Miss Vicky.

Of course, this brings a few problems with my home-rolled blogawa.ca software to light:

1. I assumed that every post would have an <author> field. Miss Vicky’s doesn’t.
2. Miss Vicky’s blogging software strips paragraph marks from her feed. Which makes for big blobs of text.

I’ll get those fixed sometime soon.

Regardless, welcome aboard!

The Green Party released its current platform. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but it’s been mentioned in a few places for its stance on net neutrality. Both Michael Geist and DataLibre picked it up.

I was making a quick CSS tweak when I noticed that I’d acquired a few new friends. In the friends listing, I had a new a friend named “buy viagra”. A looking closely, I saw that I had another new pal named “buy cialis”. I thought it odd that both Mr. Viagra and Ms. Cialis had the same first name, and that I’d forgotten meeting them.

Operating under the assumption that I’ve been hacked, I’ve upgraded to a newer version of Wordpress and twiddled a few passwords. Hopefully this should keep me hacker free for the near future.

If anyone notices any odd behaviour, please leave a comment here.

I’ve been putting some thought into Ontario’s referendum on electoral reform. The more I think about it, the more I think it was a lost cause from the start. Let’s visit a few reasons…

No Official Explanation of the Proposed System

During the closing days of Ontario’s referendum on whether to adopt a new electoral system, I heard two ads on (cough) CFRA.

The ad first came from the No side. It featured two people talking, aghast that those evil minions in Queens Park wanted to add seats to the provincial legislature. There was no discussion of what those new MPPs were meant to do, or how those politicians would actually be selected, only that “party insiders” would choose them. Instead, it closed by saying that Ontario doesn’t need any more politicians. Simple, visceral, approaching accurate, and playing on peoples existing fears.

The second ad came from the Yes side. It provided a quick summary of how the new system would work, playing up the proportionality of the result. It had to jam why the system was worth supporting into an explanation of how the system would work.

These ads show one of the weaknesses of the referendum structure: the pro and con sides were expected to explain the proposed system at the same time as they agitated for or against it. This allowed the No side to sidestep the reasons why the new system was proposed, and spin with fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

In an ideal world, Elections Ontario would have been responsible for explaining the new system, and why the Citizen’s Coalition proposed it. Instead of their useless how-to-decide pamphlets, they should have sent out similarly sized explanations of the new system, and why it was selected. Perhaps they even could have bought a little air time on radio and TV to explain the mechanics.

The Media Loves Conflict, But Abhors Conflicting Ideas

The referendum happened at the same time as the provincial election. For political reporters, that gave two potential races to follow.

In the election, there were a bunch of well-known politicians doing what the media expects them to do: disagree. Reporters just had to show up at pre-planned events and provide a play by play of the arguments. Best of all, the “defining issue” of the campaign was visceral – should Ontario fund religious schools? It’s an issue that everyone has an opinion on, and is easy to report, as anyone with a child or a religious view is fair game for an interview.

Meanwhile, in the referendum, there were two conflicting ideas, that required a fair amount of background work to understand. Understanding the proposed system required a certain amount of legwork. What’s worse there were no easy events to hang stories on: the Yes side was too disorganized, and the No side benefited from an uneducated public. Instead of reporting easy “he said, she said” stories, reporters were reduced to talking to boring university professors, and people with funny accents from other countries.

The referendum was a bigger issue than the election, as its result would have a much larger impact; but it was much harder to report. Reporters have deadlines, and want to make their stories “interesting” (ie, conflict filled and easy to understand) within a 24 hour news cycle. What did the media cover? The easy story was the election, allowing reporters to forget about the referendum.

Wherefore art thou, proposal?

The Citizen’s Assembly was similarly ignored by the media. In the coverage that I heard and saw, I didn’t hear a peep from the people who proposed the new system. Most importantly, I didn’t hear why they chose MMP over the existing system (FPTP), or over the other possible systems.

In the media’s defense, the Citizen’s Assembly was chosen from regular folks, who may not have had time or interest in being interviewed. Although I doubt that all 102 weren’t interested in taking the occasional phone interview.

This brings us to my proposal for our next referendum on electoral reform:

1. The referendum must be stand-alone. It should not occur at the same time as elections, hockey playoffs, summer, or the Olympics. The media can’t be trusted to do a decent job with any distraction.
   
2. If possible, media outlets should be forced to carry public service announcements explaining the new system.
   
3. There must be three organizations involved in the referendum: Elections Ontario, which is responsible for explaining the new system, and why it is proposed; a “pro” side, responsible for trying to get the system passed; and a “no” side, responsible for explaining why the system should not be passed.
   
4. The referendum period must be long. 35 days is not long enough to discuss actual ideas. The referendum period should be long enough that each organization in the election has a chance to present their position, and effectively respond to the positions of the other organizations. Ideally the period would be a three or four months long.

It looks like Ontario has a new (old) government. Not much is new on that front. But the good news from the election is that the Greens portion of the popular vote skyrocketed to 8%, which is an impressive gain.

The bad news is that MMP didn’t receive the support it needed to pass, which precipitates a few questions: did the MMP initiative fail because people understood it and didn’t like it, or because they misunderstood it and didn’t like it? Was the system properly explained? Should the pro-reform use this as a starting point to pushing for future reform?

Ottawa Greens is linking to a saccharin sweet campaign ad for the Green Party. The ad is unofficial, and probably shouldn’t be viewed by anyone who has a history of cavities. It’s so darn cute it may rot your entire face off.