A great article on rent control in New York, in the New York Post. Obviously (the Post is a right-wing paper) the article is against, but it contains some interesting history. Rent control was instituted in New York as a wartime measure, but subsequently socialists lobbied for permanence.

The law actually stipulates the "wartime emergency" can be lifted if vacancy rates ever reach 5 percent, but rent control prevents them from ever reaching that level.

Indeed.

Rent control was one of the reasons we decided not to rent in Berkeley when we were attending grad school at UCB; rent control had made the rents too high. Luckily, California abolished rent control so eventually the apartment market in Berkeley, San Francisco and Santa Monica will return to normal.

Dave Kopel brings up a feature of the new tax plan that I hadn't heard of in his Media Analysis Column

"Tax plan aids small firms buying SUVs" announced the Post, while the News proclaimed "A boon for SUV-buying firms."

Of course the tax plan says nothing about SUV's. It just increases the Section 179 limit. Section 179 can be used to expense any depreciable asset -- a car, computer, desk, photocopier, whatever.

Here's how it works: if you have a small business (less than $200,000 annual profit), you may write off up to $24,000 in depreciable assets immediately, provided they are used at least 50% for business purposes. As your profit exceeds the $200,000 cap, your section 179 amount is reduced dollar-for-dollar.

Never heard of it? It doesn't exist in Canada. If there's one thing I wish Canadian tax law had, it's Section 179-type expensing.

In 2002, the limit was $24,000. In 2003 it was supposed to rise to $25,000. Bush's plan triples that.

And it's a very clever thing, too, because it will stimulate small business to consume more. I would certainly consider buying a company car if I could fully expense the purchase price.

Joel on Software discusses binary search as a debugging technique:

The next thing I tried was a method I learned from Gabi at Juno: the old binary search method. Before we started work on this release, publishing took 1'04". Today it takes 1'57". So I started checking out old versions of the source from CVS by date, rebuilding, and timing how long publishing took with each day's build.

Funny, because the other day we were evangelizing this to our cow-orkers. Our client's product has several major programs in it; we own one (the compiler) and co-own one (the viewer). In practice this means that nobody owns the viewer, and nasty little bugs are always creeping in. Pretty often we use binary search to isolate them.

Also interesting is Joel's backup hell story. Our client RAID's their CVS server now, but they didn't used to. One time the CVS repository got lost (actually, I blew it away by accident), and we restored from the offsite backup (rsync to my server) and I had forgotten the argument to rsync which deletes the files... anyway, Joel's story resonates with my experience.

And his conclusion seems valid too, which is a pisser. I don't want to upgrade all our (read both our) Windows workstations to XP Pro just so I can get RAID.

Britain surrenders; commercial business jockeys for position in the "cannabis user" market, The Guardian reports:

The Government has announced that cannabis will be 'downgraded' to a class C drug next summer making arrest and prosecution for possession less likely. The move follows a controversial experiment in Lambeth, south London, where police attention focused on hard drug users and suppliers rather than cannabis smokers.

My first irrelevant thought was: Does any user really call it cannabis? Reporters and bureaucrats, sure, but real users? All the pot-smokers I know called it weed, but that was in Southern California.

And my second irrelevant thought was: will Colby Cosh object? If justifying Christmastime spending sprees as being "good for the economy" is anathema to him, how about the Guardian's line "Could cannabis smokers be the unlikely saviours of the British economy?"

Don't buy government bonds -- smoke a bowl for our GI's!

I'm not sure these are the freedoms they died to protect.

Went to a new liquor store today -- around 78th and Calgary Trail North, I guess it's called Strathcona Liquor Store. They had a better beer selection than any I've seen in Edmonton. Still no Hophead. I asked; he said he could bring it in for me in cases if I wanted it.

I got two kinds of dark beer: Beck's dark and Big Rock Black Amber Ale.

I won't get the Beck's again. Too beery -- in a Miller Lite kind of way, you understand. A lager masquerading as an ale.

I will get the Black Amber again. It's a real stout (the label says, "Dark Alberta Stout"). The last allegedly dark Canadian beer I had was a serious disappointment. In the mug it's nicely black, but when you hold it up to the light it's a dark bloody red. A good solid taste with a creamy finish. Not overpoweringly hoppy, but bitter enough.

It will do.