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-->tewhich 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.