Sambal

A good reason not to live next-door to Mr. Colby Cosh is his published enthusiasm for a certain weed….

The other day I got an automated telephone poll about the upcoming election. It was probably from Rahim Jaffer’s campaign — he’s the Conservative candidate for this riding (my US friends can think “Congressional district” every time I write riding and not be too far wrong). I’m pretty sure it was from Jaffer because one of the issues I was asked to rate in importance was “Fixed Election Dates”.

(For you Americans - the party in power (”the government”) can call an election any time it wants to, but it must call an election within five years after the government is formed. In practice they wait 3 1/2 years and then call an election as soon as they’re doing well in the polls.)

Fixed election dates is a losing issue for the Conservatives. I had a lot of time to think about it this afternoon while I was weeding dandelions out of our back yard, and here are the reasons why:

• It sounds like whining. The power of calling the election is a well-established privilege of the ruling party. Complaining that the Liberals called the election at an advantageous time makes the Conservatives sound petty and whining. They sound like the people who were complaining about the Electoral College after the 2000 election. If it’s an established rule of the political game, don’t whine about it.
• You won’t want to give it up if you win. Suppose the Conservatives pull it off and actually form a government. It’ll probably be a thin majority against the Liberals and NDP on the one hand, and Bloc on the other. In a situation like that, will the Conservatives want to throw away one of the major perqs of being the government and set a fixed election date? Or will they hang on to it because it’s expedient, just like it was expedient to move into Stornoway after all.
• Even if the Conservatives win and implement Fixed Election Dates, it’s not binding on future governments. Since Canada doesn’t have a true constitution that’s hard to amend, the law creating fixed election dates could be repealed by any future majority of Parliament - i.e., the next non-Conservative government.
• It’s not conservative. Moving to fixed election dates is exactly the kind of gratuitous change true conservatives abhor. While it may gratify the libertarians, it will needlessly piss off the Tories.
• It’s too American. Much of Canada’s political history is a soap opera of self-important Hamleting between the American way and the British way. Government-called elections are the UK way; fixed election dates are American. If there’s one thing about America the hypothetical Conservative government is going to imitate, I hope it’s something substantive like a foreign policy issue (e.g., the war on terror — Hello?) instead of something procedural like the date of the next election.

Monday and Tuesday we were meeting with a potential client to discuss a new project. Yesterday I drove our new client (no longer potential) to the airport and saw him off. In other words, we got the project.

Today I was looking around for something irrelevant and came across an article which contains a lot of interesting information about what a COM object is and isn’t. Initially I was as confused as Norman, but by the end of the discussion in the comments I understand better.

I also found this article which is relevant because among other things, I showed our new client that the Windows XP calculator is much better than the old one.

I was talking to a friend of mine about some people she knows from back home (Eastern Canada) and we looked up a radio station where she used to work and found that a guy she knows has been in a couple of movies. So we looked him up on IMDB: Mark Day.

He was in A Hole In One.

So was Meat Loaf. Yes, that Meat Loaf, the one who was also in Rocky Horror.

Since there were only about ten people in “A Hole In One” I think it’s pretty likely that Mark and Meat now know each other. That puts Mark at one degree of separation from Meat Loaf.

My friend knows Mark. That’s two.

I know my friend. That’s three. Three degrees of separation from Meat Loaf. I did not need to know that.

And you, gentle reader? Four.

Via Carl’s Blog [Beta], an interesting article about Bush at Harvard.

For me the most pertinent excerpt was:

There is simply no way on earth that the son of the then-Ambassador to China, or anyone else, could have coasted through Harvard Business School with a

Look at the title

(more…)

One of the traditional roles for the government is to be the “lender of last resort”. In the US this is one of the Federal Reserve’s responsibilities.

I realized tonight that the government is also the borrower of last resort, though that’s a less frequently filled role than the lender’s.

It works like this: when nominal interest rates are as low as they can go (zero) but real interest rates are positive, i.e., when there is deflation, then people who have capital can get a nice return by lending it instead of using it (e.g., by buying machinery or whatever). So they do: there’s lots of capital available for borrowing, but nobody willing or able to borrow it. Interest rates should drop, but they can’t because they’ve already hit the hard floor - zero. This is what Paul Krugman calls a liquidity trap, I think.

Anyway, in this situation the government can borrow money by selling bonds and spend it on wasteful projects (like paying people to dig ditches and fill them up, or building Hoover Dam), thus helping to get the economy moving again. This was the theory during the Great Depression. So: borrower of last resort.

I was browsing the constitution this morning. Actually, I read it through — it doesn’t take very long and it’s interesting. Mrs. du Toit has it up on her site and there’s a random Constitution clip at the top of her site too.

Anyway, I realized that one of the reasons that there is no Federal sales tax in the United States (as there is in almost every other developed nation, either as a VAT or, here in Canada, GST) is that under the Constitution, Congress doesn’t have the power to impose one. It would require an amendment, just like was required for income tax back in 1909.