I know this blog has been trending toward the political issues lately, and I’m loath to continue the trend, but I’ve got something I think is good.

It’s the upcoming report on the media from the senate. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: a healthy democracy depends on a large and healthy media that features several points of view. That means that you need independent editorial boards and independent news gathering.

Happily, the senate agrees with me and will say we need independent news sources in every market. Yeah. Go senate!

Of course, we’ve ignored royal commission reports in the past, so I won’t hold my breath. Still, it’s nice to see that someone up there is thinking about these issues…

 › political     2006-06-20 23:37   ...3 comments

The impending test launch of a missile that can hit the U.S. from North Korea kind of makes Bush look dumb for having focused exclusively on the non-existent threat in Iraq, no?

 › political     2006-06-19 13:26   ...1 comment

The U.S. congress is today debating the allocation of a further $94.5 billion for the war in Iraq. This has led me to speculate about how this breaks down in terms of the U.S. taxpayer base. Lots of americans are in favour of the war, but the huge budgetary numbers being tossed around seem disconnected from their actual tax payments.

(Of course, the U.S. is funding this war on debt, but that debt will one day need to be repaid, so for the sake of this back-of-the-envelope calculation, let’s just divide the cost by the number of taxpayers.)

First, we need to know how many taxpayers there are in the states. The IRS publishes tax stats. I used table 3.3 from the “Individual Income Tax Returns Publication 1304” for 2003 (the latest year available). There were 130 million returns, of which 88 931 904 actually paid income tax in a total amount $748 017 488 000.

Regarding cost of the war, getting a good estimate is tough. Very tough. That is because there is politicization of the amount. We know that Bush originally said the war would cost $50 billion. The amount I’ve seen in the news today, seemingly a total of labelled war spending to date is 320 billion dollars. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz has put the ultimate cost, including long term effects on the US economy at 1.026 trillion dollars (839 billion direct costs, and 187 billion in economic damage).

So, how does this work out per taxpayer?

Let’s put this in perspective. The CBC reports the $320 billion US is about 1.5 times the total expenditure of the Canadian government in 2005.

Prefer an american example? According to the US Department of Education there were estimated to be 1 343 000 undergrads graduating in 2006. The money spent to date on the war could have paid for their entire cost of 4 years of education including tuition, room and board.

And you know what? You could do that 4 times over before you ran out of cash… 5.6 million students could be put through their entire 4 year degree for free with just the obvious money that’s been spent so far.

(How did I come up with that? The average tuition room and board cost for a year is $14283, multiplied by a four-year college degree is $57132 per student. The 320 billion divided by $57132 is 5.6 million students put through their entire 4 year degree for free.)

Imagine the effect on the US economy of 5 million highly trained citizens with NO student debt.

I could go on, but I’ve made my point. What would you do with $3500-11000 dollars? Spend it in Iraq?

 › normative     2006-06-15 19:49   ...2 comments

Well, Weebl and Bob’s toons site has gone far far downhill since the days of Magical Trevor, but their new posting called Animator vs. Animation is awesome.

 › funny     2006-06-14 12:21   ...0 comments

I remembered this excellent article on window lighting for portraits today, because I needed a headshot for the Ottawa Folk Festival program.

I got out the tripod and snapped about 85 or so shots. It was kind of fun to do all the positioning, and I put a dark blanket over Jen’s screen to use as a backdrop. Here’s the one I sent off.

Another one I liked a lot is under the cut, as is a funny one so you can see what they looked like in colour. (I converted the images to black and white using the channel mixer technique that I read about in a photo magazine a few months ago.)

I’m also including some funny ones I did with Apple’s Photo Booth application at a computer store a few weeks ago.

6 more photos

 › photos     2006-06-07 19:12   ...1 comment

The advocacy group Environmental Defence has just released the results of testing six adults and seven children for 68 toxic chemicals (at a cost of $2000 per person).

The results? A ten year old girl had 18 carcinogens, 14 chemicals that disrupt hormones, 19 that affect reproduction and 9 neurotoxins. Some of the chemicals have been banned since 1977, almost 20 years before her birth. In her words: “How fair is that?”

It’s a small study, and I haven’t reviewed the results and compared them with “acceptable limits”. However, it looks like Health Canada is going to start doing this kind of testing on 5000 volunteers, some as young as 6 years of age. This is a positive development.

Chris says that many federal government ministers are getting tested too… that bodes well for political will. Apparently this happened in the past and it resulted in the government moving on the issue for a short time. Perhaps it should be a requirement for all politicians to get these tests…

 › normative     2006-06-02 11:49   ...0 comments