Sambal

The Edmonton Journal reports that the City of Edmonton has finally done it:

Starting Tuesday, all restaurants must go smoke-free.

Probably the biggest blow to our quality of life on moving from California to Alberta was that smoking is still allowed in public places in Alberta.

In 1995 or so, Los Angeles County made it illegal to smoke in restaurants. Eventually the state banned smoking in all restaurants and bars.

I haven’t decided yet if I’m happy with this bylaw as a legitimate exercise of the state’s power. I know I will be happy with the effect: smoke-free dining at every restaurant in Edmonton.

More on this later; I’m still working.

Not as exciting as the last one, where I learned about an apocryphal play attributed to Shakespeare.

This time they’re inserting HTML contents containing random ASCII into the middle of the text. So we get:

Gu<!–nxek91djko3–>aran<!–yzp98b3chgc9w3–>te<!–jb8gp41c6h83a–>ed Da<!–214thn27ea–>te

which is displayed as:

Guaranteed Date

This is easy to work around in a content-based spam filter: simply delete HTML comments before processing. And the arms race continues.

I don’t read magazines, not even political ones. (I cancelled my subscription to National Review because of some articles I found quite unpleasantly racist. And sadly, I never subscribed to The Report-of-the-Month before it folded.) So the first time I’ve ever seen a copy of The Nation was when we stayed overnight at a friend’s house in Seattle on our way back from the party.

I think it’s supposed to be a left-wing political and news analysis magazine. (Weirdly, it was printed on newsprint, but magazine-bound.) I flipped through it and read part of an article by William Greider, but I couldn’t get past this point:

Personal debt is now at an extraordinary 130 percent of disposable income, up by nearly one-third since the mid-1990s.

I guess that’s supposed to be a bad thing, but I can’t figure out what Greider is talking about. Personal debt? Does he mean net debt, total unsecured (e.g., credit card) debt, total personal debt not offset by assets (possibly including secured debts like home loans and car loans)? All I know about the term “personal debt” is that it’s not business debt. And I know that sometimes business debt looks like personal debt, like when we started the company and bought some PC’s using a personal credit card.

And “disposable income” — what’s that? I know what gross income is, net income after payroll and income tax withholding. What’s disposable income? Income after paying for housing and food? But surely that depends on how I eat and where I live. Quite a bit more of my income would be “disposable” if I rented in the outskirts instead of buying a house in the near suburbs — but isn’t disposition precisely what I’m doing by choosing to live here?

Perhaps I’m just ignorant of the standard economic definitions of these terms. That’s certainly possible. Then three cheers for The Nation, whose readership is so well-educated that footnotes defining these terms are un-necessary. And woe is me: I am just too dumb to join their club. As the popular bumper sticker says: Slow Thinkers Keep Right.

So I don’t know what disposable income is, and I’m not sure what personal debt figure he’s talking about. But I’m pretty sure that the relationship between income/loss and assets/liabilities involves a derivative with respect to time. The two quantities are not commensurable. So why is it a big deal when one happens to be numerically equal to the other, or growing, or larger?

In the mid-1990’s, the average consumer could have paid off all personal debt with disposable income in one year. Now, it will take slightly less than a year and four months. Is this bad? I don’t see why. I can think of a good reason why people have more debt in 2003 than in 1994: rates are down (3.5% to 1.5%). It’s cheaper to carry debt today than it was then, so people take more of it.

Either I’m missing something, or this number is just tossed in as a scare statistic. Somehow, I’m inclined to believe the latter.

My wife is currently answering a political poll over the phone. Just to sit here and listen to her is a treat, especially without hearing the other side of the conversation. My wife’s responses are in quotes below. You can guess at the pollster’s questions yourself.

“Because the teachers’ union annoys me. (pause) That’s A-N-N-O-Y-S. (pause) Yes. Annoys me.”

“Health care? Uh, I’m happy with it. (pause) No, happy with it. (pause) Yes. I’m happy with the way the provincial government runs the health care system. (pause) Because whenever I’ve needed to use the health care system, I’ve been able to do so promptly.”

“I’m happy that they’ve lowered taxes. (pause) Because I’ve been living in the United States, and I’ve seen that lower taxes provide incentives for people to produce. (pause) Lower taxes. (pause) Provide incentives. (pause) For people to produce.”

The pollster seems to have a bit of an agenda, but I think my wife’s opinions are getting through.

…that I don’t have a television?

(Shamelessly ripped off from Mark Shea’s much better blog)

This caught my eye:

Coal would be a lot less valuable if it was found as a layer one centimeter thick spread over an area the size of the states of Iowa and Nebraska; the collection process would defeat the purpose. How difficult would it be to gather it all? How much equipment would be needed? Would it make sense economically to buy it all, given that each piece of equipment could only collect a relatively small amount of coal? Unfortunately, it wouldn’t.

In fact it turns out that Alberta is covered by a 1-cm thick layer of coal. If you go down in the river valley you can see the coal layer, maybe 20-30 ft. down from the surface.

I’m often complaining about the crap beer I buy around here. Since we were just in the states and I got some of the beer I like, I’ll even the score:

Anderson Valley Brewing Company’s India Pale Ale

Best IPA ever; probably my favorite beer. I don’t know, maybe if I drank it all the time I’d get bored. It’s hard to describe, though. Crisp. Light-bodied. Quite a bit of alcohol (7%) but doesn’t feel heavy. Very, very hoppy, of course.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Company’s Sierra Nevada Stout

Also heavy on the hops, but definitely a stout-character beer. My description will be a little disjointed, as I’m drinking one now. I think part of the flavor may come from malt bitterness, but I’m not very good at judging that. Anyway, a nice heavy beer, deeply carbonated as a stout should be. Black in color. If you’re not a fan of bitter beers, you might prefer Sierra Nevada’s Porter.

Red Hook ESB Amber

I didn’t realize this was Red Hook’s standard ESB format; I thought they’d had ESB for a while and recently introduced ESB Amber. But the web site doesn’t reflect that. Perhaps they just haven’t updated their web site in a while.

I usually don’t prefer red beers, but after drinking a lot of Rickard’s Red (a Molson product) because it’s what my father-in-law likes and hey, free beer, I found the Red Hook ESB to be quite pleasant and drinkable.

Also, I like most of the beer I brew. (The last batch sucked in the small bottles, but I think that was a stuck fermentation and a hasty bottling.) The current batch is about ready to bottle, and it’s the Arrogant Bastard from Replicator. I’ve made it twice before and it gets better each time.

I’m still reading the Supreme Court decisions handed down last week: the two affirmative action/University of Michigan cases (Gratz v. Bollinger, Grutter v. Bollinger) and the Texas sodomy case (Lawrence v. Texas), and it’s a hard slog. I think it’s worthwhile, though. Reading Bush v. Gore was.

When reading Supreme Court opinions, I’m struck by how well they (or at least their clerks) write. The justices impress me as intelligent, principled, hard-working people, even when I disagree with the decision or the reasoning that was used. I guess this is what it feels like to have respect for a branch of the government. Funny how I’m not used to this feeling.

Anyway, I was reading Lawrence today and I came across this bit, from the majority opinion:

Both Eisenstadt and Carey, as well as the holding and rationale in Roe, confirmed that the reasoning of Griswold could not be confined to the protection of rights of married adults.

California used to have(*) a rape law that, among other things, described the following scenario as rape:

1. Persons A and B are both over age 18.
2. Person B is intoxicated, and person A knows it (or should reasonably know it)
3. Person A has penetrative intercourse with person B.
4. Persons A and B are not married.

My reading of this is that it’s illegal to drug and rape someone, as long as that person is not your spouse. Or, the right of married adults to have sex when one of them is incapacitated by drink does not guarantee a similar right to unmarried people.

My question is, under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence, can a law of this nature stand? It seems to me that it can’t; that the Supreme Court has said that you can’t extend special rights (e.g., legal consensual sodomy in the Texas case) only to married couples, or only to heterosexual couples. So that leaves the California legislature with a choice: either take away the “right” of married people to drug and rape their spouses, or extend this “right” to unmarried people as well.

In this case it’s obvious which way they’ll go, and in fact (see below) it’s already illegal in California to have penetrative sex with your spouse if you should reasonably know your spouse is intoxicated.

This isn’t a terribly good example, because I don’t see why there should be different rules for spousal vs. non-spousal rape in the first place. But the Supreme Court seems to be limiting the situations in which the states can discriminate by marital status. In which case, why have a legal system which recognizes marriage at all?

* I say “used to have” because the law appears to have been changed. See Sections 261-269 California Penal Code. The “intoxication” clause is 261.3 (non-spousal rape) and 262.2 (spousal rape). This renders the specific question moot, but leaves the general question — Can states have criminal laws that discriminate by married status? — open.

We don’t have a banker — we do it online. We don’t have a stock broker. On the rare occasions that we want to do stock transactions, we do them online. We don’t have any kind of merchandise broker, since we’re not in any business with inventory.

But we do have a currency broker. Frightening, really. It all dates back to when we were buying the house, converting USD to CAD. Getting a good rate actually made a difference for once. And once we’d made one decent-sized transaction, we got into a rolodex for “people who sometimes want to exchange small amounts of money”. Small by currency trader standards, of course; pretty large piles of cash by my standards.

Anyway, Michael just called us up to let us know that the CAD-USD exchange rate is really good just now, making it a good time to buy USD.

Yeah, we know. We bill in USD. (grumble).

At the party on Saturday night, we were on the subject of Cuba. I think I was mentioning how weird it is to see posters advertising vacations in Cuba plastered all over the subway here. Cuba is a popular vacation spot for Canadians; Canada of course does not have an embargo on Cuba, as the U.S. does.

Somebody piped up “100% literacy rate, though… impressive.”

I responded, “Doesn’t help you much if you can’t read what you want.”

And the subject was changed.

Today, reading through back issues of The Corner, I found this:

QUOTES [Jonah Goldberg]

Lots of readers sending me their favorite Jonah-quotes. Modesty precludes me from posting them here. However, one reader sent me this one from the Derb which I like a great deal:

“Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.”

Exactly.