In an online world, there are many more of us to watch them than there were of them to watch us. The technology was bound to work against those who value privacy most – but it was only this year we learned those privacy-lovers are very often governments.
Just watch us: The utopian dream of total openness - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)
After all, what could more certain (or cherished!) than your tough-minded, critical and enlightened self?
Science, the cruel stranger - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)
Toronto’s latte classes may look down on you if you move to Guelph. But these days, even Guelph’s got latte.
A tale of two Torontos - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)
It was time for some “blue collar” people to run city hall – says a millionaire putting the seals of office around the neck of another millionaire. Time to get the “artsy” people out of city hall – says a public-broadcasting television comedian. Time for a fresh new start – and the “lefty pinkos” can put that in their pipe, setting the scene for four years of gracelessness, thuggishness and pointless conflict, so it would seem.
Don Cherry, the eye-opener - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)
Last, there should be appointed a Minister of Opportunity Costs, whose sole responsibility would be to remind his colleagues around the cabinet table that nothing is free, that to favour one industry is to penalize every other. No doubt they will be astonished to hear it. Every single time.
A grasping riot of mutual pocket-pickers - Andrew Coyne - Macleans.ca (via Instapaper)
Insist that a single percent of risk is 1 percent too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel otherwise be dealt with punitively, if they won’t shut up.
How our “security” obsession costs us - National security - Salon.com (via Instapaper)
Halloween 2010
Toronto’s newly elected mayor identified that anger and the anxiety. Rob Ford fed into it and preyed on it, telling voters in the simplest terms possible that the current crop of politicians were to blame for all their problems, that there were easy solutions that required no sacrifices, that soon they would be able to pay less to their government and get better services in return.
Dalton McGuinty’s reckoning with the days of wrath - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)
Southbrook Pumpkin Patch
Most Canadians are simply not disturbed by the questions they are asked on the mandatory long-form census. There is no groundswell of opposition. There is not even a ripple. According to nearly everyone who has expressed an informed opinion, including two former chief statisticians at Statistics Canada, the voluntary replacement will be less accurate and hence less useful. It also costs more.
Todd Houston, Ironman
Smoothies
Lake Okanagan
Airplane
How in the world did we get to the point that filling out the long form census is just too much to ask? I frankly cannot remember if I, personally, have ever had to do the long form. I’m old enough that I probably did and I hate forms enough that I may have blocked it from memory – but it simply cannot be too great a price to pay for being a Canadian citizen and helping to ensure that all citizens share in its benefits. And my guess – the majority of Canadians would agree, even if, like me, they hate the questions.
I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census.
It can not.
Under the circumstances, I have tendered my resignation to the Prime Minister.
To turn statistical methodology into a political controversy, a government has to really screw up. But to make statisticians shriek and flap their arms like wounded albatrosses, to cause policy wonks to turn purple with rage, to compel retired civil servants to dispense with a lifetime of discretion and denounce the government’s gobsmacking jackassery to reporters … Well, that’s something special.
Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller firms and no leverage - a world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks, and in which companies are born and die every day without making the news.