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

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.

Reading through the last week's CVS commits just now. It's a perfect post-holiday ice water bucket. Reminds me of the rigors of my job. Like for instance the [INTERN] who spells license "lisence". Or the cat who is still agitated by our vacation and keeps demanding attention -- now clawing at the laundry room door, now sitting on my lap, now threatening to short out the power strips with a well-placed stream of urine.

Even when he sits on my lap, he'd be digging his claws into my leg (lovingly of course) if I wasn't still wearing a towel. (And who am I to complain about my job, you might wonder, when I work from home, set my own hours, and commute naked? Feh.)

But that's all right because there was one good commit last week and it makes it all worth while:

global.cpp, global.h: BugzId: N Remove rOldClipBox from globals and move it in to print.cpp.

That's my cheerful thought of the day. Somebody eliminated a global variable, and it wasn't me.

A quick link -- Arnold Kling (q.v.) refers to this post briefly in his latest column. Mainly the graphs. I gave it a quick look and read the first line:

With the conquest of Iraq, the American Empire stands at its zenith.

And he proceeds to argue so for several pages. I haven't read it, just looked at the graphs, so I have no comment on the rest of the content. But I wonder how Mr. billmon can feel so sure that he has found the zenith of the American Empire, which he claims we now stand upon.

Perhaps he believes he has a general zenith-predicting ability? If so, why isn't he working in financial services?

On the first leg of our drive down, we headed south along the 2 -- the main north-south highway in Alberta.

I'm haven't had many thunderstorms in the last 25 years. In northern California you see about one thunderstorm every seven or so years, and in SoCal they're even less frequent. When I was three years old, and we had just moved to California from Texas, one of those infrequent thunderstorms came while I was at Montessori. I was the only kid who went to the window and watched -- the California kids hid under their desks, thinking it was an earthquake. (Good thing it wasn't an earthquake, so there was no breaking falling glass to kill me.)

We hit the first thunderstorm around Red Deer. Fat heavy drops of rain started pounding into the windshield, and my wife soon had the wipers up on maximum. Then it slackened off a little. Then OH SHIT! Nothing was visible at all through the entire windshield. I've only ever had that experience in a car wash, not going 80km/hr on a major freeway. People were pulling off the road to sit out the thunderstorm. The lucky ones found a space under the freeway bridges.

Two more thunderstorms between Red Deer and our first night's sleep in Fernie, B.C. Only one more total windshield wipeout.

And another thunderstorm this morning, looks like. What happened to "Sunny Alberta"?

Back from our road trip. We left last Wednesday after 4:00 PM and returned last night around half past eight. Strange dreams this morning in which, among other things, I was responsible for the starving death of a rat.

Last night I was feeling up to writing a long entry about the road trip and what we found there, but now I've reconsidered. Too lazy, too tired, and too busy this morning. So it'll all be coming out in dribs and drabs over the next week or so, except the stuff that I forget about, which will haunt me evermore.

Down in Sunnyvale today -- we've been driving for the last two days. So little posting.

We're staying with friends at the Alpine Butterfly Lodge in Sunnyvale, for their third annual housewarming party.

The high point of the drive was Crater Lake. I've seen Crater Lake, California but it's just a tiny crater, maybe half a mile across. Crater Lake, Oregon is five miles across, ringed by 2000-ft cliffs and is itself nearly 2000 ft deep -- the deepest lake in the United States. Unfortunately there was a late snow -- in May -- and the campsites were still closed.

My wife said:

You know, I'm thinking of writing an e-mail to [COW-ORKER 1] and [COW-ORKER 2] just to let them know how much I appreciate that they can spell.

Until [INTERN] came, I had no idea that it could be painful to read through CVS commits.

Looking back, I see a twelve-day gap in my archives.

No particular reason. There's been a lot of work, and one of our main client's servers suffered a bit of a meltdown (root disk failed). We wound up reinstalling the OS from media.

Then there was a feint at upgrading to MySQL. But they decided to stay with Access.

Then there was miscellaneous other stuff. We bought a car (2002 Ford Focus wagon, blue, 10Mm on the odometer). Our housemate moved out, and there was much rejoicing. The cat population of our house halved.

We had several momentary power outages that brought down the server, and when the server reboots the web server doesn't come back up unless the site was shut down cleanly.

I'm not sure I have what it takes to do the blogging thing. I am too inhibited to share actual intimate details of my life online, but on the other hand I'm too polite to bitch about people who might actually find my blog. And I just don't desire celebrity enough to blog religiously.

Bummer.

The new trick of spammers is to include unique text in the text/plain portion of a mime/multipart message, and the actual spam in the text/html part which follows.

Their source for unique text? Etext repositories!

Since my mailer displays only the text/plain part, I get very strange spam:

Subject: Samuel, We Help You Find The Lowest Refinancing Rates

MUCEDORUS. Oh, master mouse, I pray you what office might you bear in the court? MOUSE. Marry, sir, I am a rusher of the stable. MUCEDORUS.

That's from The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine and Mucedorus, attributed to William Shakespeare.

I would never have known the play existed, but for this spam.

This just in: World War II is over.

And now the troops are coming home. Or moving elsewhere:

the United States is planning to shift most of its forces from Germany, South Korea and the Japanese island of Okinawa.... The plans ... would reorient America’s presence in Europe eastward to Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, and shift U.S. power in the Far East toward southeast Asia, with options for new bases in northern Australia, the Philippines and even Vietnam being explored.

Fifty-eight years after the end of World War II, we're finally pulling out the occupation troops. Does anyone seriously doubt that we'll be in Iraq for tens of years?

(Of course these are only plans, and they're subject to change, blah blah.)

I was up until 4:00 AM last night babysitting a server rebuild after the root disk started failing on our client's main server. (The code resides on a RAID, and is fine.) So please excuse me if I'm a bit punchy.

So the Conservatives have dealt themselves a death blow, saving any other Canadian political party from having to put them out of their misery. At least so argues Lorne Gunter in an Edmonton Journal article excerpted on David Frum's political diary. (Not sure about the ethics of that, Dave...) The depressing end:

Loyal Tories are left with four choices: swallow hard and accept an Orchard-influenced party, sit out the next election, make nice with the Martin Liberals or join the Canadian Alliance. The last option is the least palatable, but the other three guarantee a fourth, consecutive Liberal majority, perhaps even with significant gains in the West.

Perhaps I should be happy for the Alliance, but I have no doubt of their ability to piss away this opportunity as they have every other. Where is Stephen Harper's statement that freedom is what the CA stands for, and that free trade with Canada's neighbor and closest trading partner (the bedrock of the Canadian export economy) is a key component of the CA platform? Instead he's whining that MacKay won't return his calls:

The Alliance leader said there is now no point raising the issue [of electoral co-operation] with Mr. MacKay. Still, he intends to continue pressing pro-unity members of the Conservatives to consider the plan.
"Mr. MacKay has not only indicated no interest at this point, he indicated he is not open to discussion," he said.
...
Mr. Harper said Mr. MacKay had not yet returned phone calls he placed to congratulate him on his victory in the leadership race.

Idiot. It's not MacKay who you're trying to impress. Try to get some of the free-trader Tories before they all go to the Liberals.

There's a nice rhetorical trick in today's OpinionJournal - Featured Article:

More broadly, the critics want everyone to forget how steeply progressive the tax code already is. IRS data released late last year show that the top 1% of earners paid 37.4% of all federal income taxes in 2000. The top 5% paid 56.5% of federal taxes, and the top half of all earners paid 96.1%. In other words, even before President Bush started slashing taxes on the poor by increasing the child tax credit in 2001, the bottom 50% of filers had next to no federal income tax liability.[emphasis added]

Not quite. The figures show that the bottom 50% of filers contributed next to nothing to the total income tax revenue -- 3.9% of the total. But it's not the same thing to claim that these filers had "next to no federal income tax liability". Their federal income tax liability may well have been substantial, relative to their total income.

With an argument that's otherwise quite strong, there's no need to use silly rhetorical and mathematical tricks to make it appear stronger. It just annoys people like me, who would otherwise be in total agreement.

Not surprisingly, the point I made here was made earlier by Arnold Kling:

The phrase "tax cuts for the rich" is designed to trigger an idiotarian response. You are supposed to see a conflict between the Communal Sharing of the tax revenue that naturally belongs to all of us and the Authoritarian Ranking of powerful rich people stealing from this communal resource.

I've been reading his blog but I just found his archive of columns which is more accessible to the non-economist.

Check out this one on his history as a Vietnam protestor.