Sambal

Stood in line for two hours tonight to see Mars through a telescope. It looked like a tiny yellow ball.

I received my papers in the mail yesterday, retroactively legalizing me to the anniversary of my date of entry into Canada. I’m very pleased about that.

To explain: I have a NAFTA visa, which allows me to work in Canada for a Canadian employer. The visa only lasts a year, but is renewable. About a month before the expiry date is when you’re supposed to send in your renewal papers. I sent in my renewal papers. The month passed. My status expired.

Four more weeks passed, and on Tuesday I received a phone call from Immigration Canada.

“Is this Samuel Mikes?”

“Yes.”

“I have before me your application to renew your NAFTA visa.”

“Yes?”

“You forgot to sign it.”

He allowed me to digest that for a moment.

“Did you keep a copy?”

Yes and I’ll just sign that and fax it right to you. Thankyouverymuchsir.

And then my papers came in yesterday’s mail. So: they’re so backlogged that a simple form-review sits in a hopper for 8 weeks — 4 weeks longer than they predict — and then a guy looks at it for an hour and it’s approved. Amazing.

But I am happy that I again enjoy the right of leaving and re-entering the country.

BANG! OW! (limps away).

The sound you just heard was California Lt. Governor and gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante shooting himself in the foot.

On the day that his biggest rival for the governorship — yes, I mean Arnie, not Gray Davis — was embarrassed by the publication of a 1977 interview where he admits to drug use and describes his sex life in detail; on this day, I say, Cruz Bustamante advocates price controls on gasoline.

Read it yourself: Bustamante Seeks to Regulate Oil Industry in California. Bustamante proposed giving the Public Utilities Commission control over gasoline prices, and yes, those are the same people who came up with and implemented California’s failed deregulation plan. The same deregulation plan Bustamante now regrets having voted for.

So. Suppose the PUC legislates the price of gasoline at $2.40 a gallon, but ARCO can’t produce it at their Long Beach refinery for less than $2.70. What will happen:
a) ARCO will shut down the refinery and there will be a gas shortage
b) the State will have to bail out the refineries to the tune of 30 cents a gallon times twenty million people’s gas consumption
c) both?

Gas lines and taxpayer bailouts are coming to California. All those people who wish they could relive the 70’s will have the opportunity soon.

Cosh plucks this thought from a fictitious liberal’s mind: “Why would anyone want a McDonald’s parked smackdab in the middle of Prague?”

Exactly! It’s not hard to find cheap food in Prague, even cheap authentic Czech food. What’s missing in domestic cuisine that a foreigner might value is fast and predictable, and McDonald’s does a fine job of providing that.

We actually went to a McDonald’s in Prague (my first time) when we were there last March visiting family. It turns out that food cures morning sickness, and when we got out of the Museum of the City of Prague, my wife was hungry and there was a McDonald’s right across the street.

Most of the clientele were young Czechs, which just goes to show that you can’t keep cheap crappy fast food out of kid’s mouths — not without making it illegal. “You can have my Big Mac when you pry it from my cold, greasy fingers”? Which I suppose goes back to Cosh’s point from the other day.

Nothing but provide jobs for Westerners. Don’t take it from me — read this interview with Michael Maren, a returned Peace Corps Volunteer who has spent the last 20 years working in development and journalism in Africa: A complete waste of money that succeeds primarily at keeping Westerners Employed

Read the whole thing.

Well, good news for me, anyway, since it will benefit our client’s clients, and what’s good for them is good for us. And good news for electricity, plastics and chemicals consumers in the U.S. because they’ll be getting cheaper stuff. Good news all around, unless you like to breathe, right? And who does that anymore?

The EPA is relaxing some of its equipment replacement rules. Naturally the New York Times has a fit:

In one of its most far-reaching environmental actions, the Bush administration signed a rule that will allow thousands of power plants, refineries, pulp and paper mills, chemical plants and other industrial facilities to make extensive upgrades that increase pollutants without having to install new antipollution devices.

Those blackguards!

Fox News, on the other hand, is thrilled:

Thousands of older power plants, refineries and factories have been exempted from having to install costly clean air controls when they update equipment to improve efficiency, the Bush administration announced Wednesday.

Strangely, though, Fox gives more time to the Natural Resources Defense Council than the New York Times.

“It’s an accounting gimmick that eliminates any possibility of pollution controls,” said John Walke, director of Natural Resources Defense Council’s clean air program. “It’s a total disaster. It’s the effective repeal of this clean air program, through illegal administrative means.”

Whether that’s because Fox thinks Mr. Walke has a funny-sounding name is left to the reader’s discretion.

So I read the stupid fact sheet and I’ve skimmed the final rule. There are some choice quotes in the final rule, like this Clinton-bash

Specifically, some of the case-by-case determinations we have made, particularly over the past decade, and particularly in a series of enforcement actions, have been criticized for giving the exclusion a narrow scope that disallows replacement of significant plant components with identical or functionally equivalent components.

Here’s my summary of the issue. The clean air act requires that a new plant must install state-of-the-art pollution control measures, under a provision called New Source Review (NSR). Old plants are grandfathered in and allowed to operate with their current equipment as long as they meet other applicable clean air standards. But if you upgrade an old plant in any way which results in an increase in pollutant output, you may run afoul of the NSR rules. It’s expensive to get an NSR permit, it’s risky to guess that your upgrade is in compliance, and it’s expensive (though less expensive) to get a review that says NSR does not apply. This has led to silliness like upgraded plants being shut off for parts of the day or year so that their total pollutant output doesn’t exceed their pre-upgrade output.

So under the new rule, replacement of parts with identical or functionally equivalent parts will not trigger NSR even if emissions increase unless the replacement effects a change to the design parameters of the plant.

Suppose your heat exchanger pump fails. Under the old rules, you’re better off trying to repair it. If you replace it (even with the exact same model) and your emissions increase (even though you’re under the legal limit), you run the risk of needing an NSR review, unless you can convince the EPA that the increase happened because of repair, maintenance, and routine replacement (RMRR). The EPA decides this on a case-by-case basis.

Under the new rules, you can replace the pump with the exact same model, or if you can’t get the exact same model pump that you got back in 1971 when the plant was commissioned, you can put in a new pump. You’re can no longer get into trouble if your emissions increase. There are still rules: the aggregate replacement cost for a year has to be less than 20% of your plant’s value. You can’t increase the maximum input or output capacity of your plant — so you can’t sneak in an extra turbine in this way. And of course you can’t violate any existing emission limit.

This looks like a good and sensible change. But then, I’m an industry shill.

I don’t have time to write a long thoughtful response to Colby’s post about creeping totality, but I have to tell you — and I mean this admiringly — that he has produced the most impressive burst of wind on the subject that I have seen in a long time.

After all, what Colby says boils down to slippery slope. Enough people dislike smoking sections in restaurants that a majority of their elected representatives feels comfortable in banning them — and this will inevitably lead to the total ban and destruction of pre-1978 literature.

As Colby himself pointed out last September, this has “the cognitive status of a fart”.

Good night.

The New York Times is reporting today (link requires registration) that several atypical antipsychotic (AA) drugs increase the patient’s risk of diabetes. This includes Zyprexa and Risperidal, the two leading AAs.

This is a bummer for anyone who’s on AAs. Of course the near-term benefits of the AA are often worth significant downline risk: how do you enjoy your healthy old age without your sanity? But — especially if you’ve been prescribed AAs because you suffer from mental illness — how difficult would it be to believe the following paranoid scenario: The pharmaceutical companies are giving you one drug (”because you’re crazy”) to make you diabetic and thereby hook you on their diabetes-management products?

Probably there’s a Philip K. Dick novel which explores this issue.

Our nine-year-old niece was visiting for the last two weeks too. I remember her as the first child I really babysat, when she was about 16 months old; my sister and my mom took a night off and left me at home with the baby. I think I even changed her, which was a big YUCK moment for me.

Our lifestyle is pretty boring, especially for a nine-year-old. But she’s been doing stuff all summer: sports camp, theater camp, actual camping trips. So she welcomed the opportunity to do nothing at all. For the first four days, she reclined on our couch in the sunlight and occasionally picked raspberries.

We did do some fun things, too — more fun than the Folk Festival that we dragged her to. We spent a day at the West Edmonton Mall waterpark, which is a lot more fun that I would have expected. I start to see how people could come here and stay in the mall for a week as a vacation.

The most amusing moment was when I found out she abetted (and probably encouraged) our five-year-old nephew (my wife’s sister’s son) in filling his hair with a mixture of glue and sequins. No-one’s used to having older kids around — especially unrelated kids with enough charisma to inspire such behavior. We were quite upset with her, of course. But it was still funny.

Yesterday I went around the house and closed all the windows; I also turned the heater off of “summer mode”. I left the bathroom windows open an inch for ventilation, but other than that we’re starting to seal up the house for the winter.

It’s getting chilly early this year. When we moved here in early August 2001, I don’t remember it feeling like this until September.