Canadian Cincinnatus

Once again, our right to self-defense is under attack by the Province of Ontario

In March of this year, Ontario’s crown prosecutors persecuted Ian Thompson of Welland for the crime of defending himself against multiple armed attackers who assaulted his house in the wee hours of the morning. Mr. Thompson’s sin was that he used a gun to defend himself and his property (which was being firebombed). I wrote about it here and here. The result was a legal nightmare for Ian Thompson, that I had thought he had won, thanks to public pressure that gun rights activists had brought to bear on this case.

But I now hear from Mr. Thompson’s lawyer, Ed Burlew, that the persecution still lingers to this day. According to Mr. Burlew, “The charges of weapons dangerous and careless use were dropped. However, the crown is still prosecuting Mr. Thompson on the charges of careless storage of the firearms and a two-day trial is scheduled for January 30 and 31.”

If you know anything about Canadian gun law in, you will know that careless storage is the catchall charge that the cops use to go after gun owners if they want to get them when they haven’t done anything wrong. Any reasonable prosecutor would have dropped the matter completely when the careless use charges were dropped. Of course, any reasonable prosecutor would not have pursued this outrageous matter in the first place. What is happening is that an obstinate persecutor is going after Mr. Thompson out of spite.

His lawyer, Ed Burlew, is appealing for donations again, as Mr. Thompson is (or was) unemployed and is therefore not wealthy. I have mailed in my cheque. To see how you can help Mr. Thompson (and help protect our right to defend ourselves), please call Ed Burlew’s office at 905-882-2422.

 

One way to trim the Toronto Transit Commission budget without cutting service: automate the subway ticket booths

In 2005 I was in Washington DC for a conference and had occasion to take their Metro. What a contrast between Toronto’s filthy subway system: light-years cleaner and with features our subway would only receive much later (such as a display giving the ETA of the next train). What I also noticed was that every Metro station was unmanned. Every single one. No ticket takers in sight.

What each Metro station has instead is an automat that dispenses magnetic-stripe cards, with the amount of money you deposit into the machine electronically recorded on the card. When you go through the turnstile and swipe your card, the fare is subtracted from your total. If your card runs low, you stick it in the machine and top it up using cash or a credit card; if you want to minimize this ritual, you load up your card; if you lose your card, you buy another one. Dead simple and absolutely convenient.

In Toronto, in contrast, you have to buy a ticket or a token from the guy in the booth, you drop the ticket into a slot under his watchful eye. Needless to say, being a ticket taker for the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is not a minimum wage job, not by a long shot (and that’s not counting their generous benefits). And to add insult to injury, even though the booth is manned by a person, I don’t think he can even take credit or debit cards! (At least I have never seen it done.)

When I saw the Washington setup, I thought: my God! our system hasn’t changed since I was a kid. I recalled taking the subway with my mother in the late 1960’s when the arrangement was exactly the same. Since that time, the only significant ‘improvement’ is that tokens these days are bimetallic, like the toonie. Back then they were a simple aluminium stamping, but that changed when it was discovered that they were being counterfeited en mass in China. With all the advances that have been made in recent decades in access control technology, there must be a thousand ways to improve and automate this antiquated process, the Washington DC solution being just one of the ‘better ways’.

Why doesn’t the TTC management suggest one to help deal with Mayor Rob Ford’s TTC cuts?

Answer: I think, because they can see with perfect clarity that it would work all too well in cutting costs and improving customer convenience. And we can’t have that now, can we?

 

What if you do “want to be rich, famous, and demented and dead at 40?”

I see from this National Post article that the nanny state-ers are at it again, trying to bring professional hockey into the nerf-universe they would like all of us to inhabit. The article quotes neurologist, Dr. Rajendra Kale as saying, “One question I’d like to ask hockey players is, ‘Do you want to be rich, famous and demented and dead at 40?’ It’s not that it’s going to happen to everybody, but there’s a good chance that would happen. Is that what they want?”

Really,  50% of all professional hockey players die as gibbering invalids at age 40? Or is it 30%? Or 5%? How low does the probability have to be in order for it count as a ‘good chance’? 

The reason I ask is that there seems to be an awful lot of news items about aging NHL stars. Rocket Richard died at age 78 (from cancer). Gordie Howe (age 82), Jean Beliveau (age 80), Bobby Hull (age 72), Dave Keon (age 71) and Guy Lafleur (age 60) are all still with us; none of them seem to be suffering from dementia or Parkinson’s, and all of them played in the era of no helmets.

But even if Dr. Kale were right and the rate of dying by 40 from dementia really is significant, does it follow that the only rational response to his question is no?

Life is about the tradeoffs between benefits and risk. The nanny state-ers like to assume that people would automatically choose safety over every other thing, like, say, significant life accomplishment. But for a 17 year old kid from small town Ontario with an IQ of 89 but a supernatural ability at hockey, the choice may well be between being rich and famous and demented and dead at 40, or poor and obscure and mowed down by a cement mixer at age 40 while coming home from night shift at the shoelace factory.

Every choice we make has potential risks and rewards, with crucial information about many of the relevant conditional probabilities unavailable to us at the time we have to decide. So why is the seemingly safest course of action automatically the only rational option? Kale does not say.

And putting hockey superstars and other ubermench aside, is the safest choice even the most common choice selected by us regular folk? 

Perhaps less often than Dr. Kale thinks. While at university I held a summer job at an Ontario Hydro power plant. One fitter I worked with told me that when a reactor overhaul was in progress at the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, it was common practice for the fitters and other workers to surreptitiously leave their Atomic Energy of Canada supplied dosimeter just outside the airlock so that their overtime wouldn’t be maxed out by their radiation dosage. When facing a choice between a couple hundred bucks next week or an incrementally increased risk of cancer 30 years from now, these guys chose the former. Are they wrong to do so? Were those men insane?

Explorer Ernest Shackleton famously put out this ad for his ill-fated Antarctic expedition:

"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter Cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success."

Were the 5,000 men (and “three sporty girls”) who responded to his ad crazy, or were they being heroic? The public at the time overwhelmingly believed the latter (and still do). What about our soldiers who volunteer for combat in Afghanistan? The risk of death or dismemberment in a typical combat tour is far higher than that faced by any professional athlete, at much smaller remuneration than a professional athlete. Is Dr. Kale saying that Canadian soldiers are not heroic, just merely nuts?

What Dr. Kale and his control-freak friends need to understand is that risks are inherent in life, and they are but one factor going into the decisions we make. On this point, I think Helen Keller put it best:

 “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

The best explanation of the EU follies I have yet read

Every time I hear that EU officials are preparing yet another bailout, bigger than the previous one, to save the Euro, I shake my head. The more good money they throw after bad, the worse the Eurocrats are making the crash when it finally does come. How do I know a crash is coming? Simple. When too much bad debt accumulates, the free market’s natural healing mechanism is bankruptcy. The more bailout money countries like Greece get, the more they waste and the more exposed previously solvent banks become; and the bigger the next bailout needs to be. Clearly, instability in the system is increasing. At some point it has to stop. I think the operating principle of the Eurocrats is fear: fear of the bust. Their answer: to kick the can down the road far enough that Something Happens to fix it.

Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club, riffing off Nassim Taleb (who has an article in Foreign Affairs on why the US didn’t see the Arab Spring in Cairo coming), offers the best theoretical explanation of why overcentralized bureaucracies cannot foresee (let alone control) Black Swan events:

“The elites won’t see them coming rather than that they can’t. Part of the problem is the consequence of their own damping. By attempting to centrally manage systems according to some predetermined scheme they actually store up volatility rather than dispersing it. By kicking the can down the road they eventually condemn themselves to bumping into a giant pile of cans when they run out of road.”

Taleb here: 

“Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite.”

Back to Fernandez:

“Thus every bailout and rescue made in the name of preventing the demise of something deemed “too big to fail” builds up a head of steam until the point is reached when the system can no longer contain the pressure. Then the volatility goes from a seeming zero to an extremely high number. The Black Swan will have arrived. And it always will for as long as fiction is substituted for fact, failure is relentlessly reinforced and false assurances are given all around.”

“Given the fact that politicians and economic managers are elected or promoted for their skill at “controlling events,” they can hardly admit that they cannot. It will take an intellectual revolution to make everyone realize that human control over the real world is really limited. And yet accepting that volatility must be faced rather than hidden is the key to preventing the arrival of even more Black Swans.”

The answer to this problem is decentralization:

“The key difference between a central manager and more localized management is that the local managers do not feel compelled to a create a grand unified theory of events. They do not have an incentive to keep stories consistent with the overall narrative. They have no talking points from which to stray. They only have problems, which they more or less try to solve.

There is a positive correlation between the degree of centralization and the required amount of “smoothing” that the headquarters will demand. Localized response can deal with variation. Huge central planning organizations cannot. And it is in the differences — it is in the outliers — where the significant information lies. When everything has been smoothed out to conform to the 5 Year Central Plan, then Taleb argues, all the real information has been simultaneously purged.”

I think this is about right. The economy is a complex adaptive system. It’s too complicated to control. Indeed, left on its own, it will find its optimal solution. Central control only gets in the way of the uncountable feedback mechanisms built into the marketplace. All the central planners end up doing is to cause the imbalances to unnaturally accumulate even more.

Fernandez then adds this interesting point I hadn’t even thought of:

“One might add that advances in IT itself have contributed to this problem.  With the advent of computer networks, databases and intelligence fusion came not real control but to a large extent, only the illusion of control.  IT did not in fact allow the elites to eliminate Black Swans. What it did was enable them to hatch very large ones.”

Democracy, real democracy - like the referendum that Greece proposed over its bailout (but which was subsequently squelched by the EUrocrats) - is part of the answer to the problem of the technocratic elite: 

“When E. E. Schattschneider said, “Democracy is not to be found in the parties but between the parties,” he was on to something. It is not that either party has the truth, but simply that a debate between any two genuinely opposed sides facilitates the emergence of the truth, even as a byproduct. This is a clue to why freedom works. It prevents the emergence of a single authoritative dogma, which left to itself would ruthlessly exterminate all other points of view, the truth in especial, if it were inconvenient.”

 

How to cut the Toronto Transit Commission’s budget while improving public transit

Currently, controversy is swirling around Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s attempt to reign in city hall spending by cutting the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) budget by 10%. Aside from the usual cause-of-the-month club crybabies, many transit users are upset that the cuts are to be funded by service cuts along many popular bus routes.

This is of course totally unnecessary. Does the TTC waste at least 10% of its budget? Of course it does. So could the TTC cut 10% of its budget and still maintain all present services? Of course it could – if it wanted to. But it, or more specifically its management, has no interest in doing so. For starters, it would mean admitting that they had not been doing a good job until now. Secondly, a significant part of the bloat comes from its top heavy management: i.e. them.

Instead, what they are doing is following the bureaucrat’s standard playbook for surviving budget cuts: they identify the most visible services that are the most politically painful to cut - and cut them. This has two effects: it inflicts pain on their tormentors (frugal politicians like Mayor Ford), and it puts pressure on City Hall to restore their budget as soon as possible.

So what could Rob Ford do instead?

Introduce transit competition. Competition is the mechanism by which private companies out-produce the government. Nobody wants to run a lean, mean, innovative outfit: neither bureaucrat nor corporate CEO. It’s simply too much hard work and its too risky. What differentiates the private sector from the government sector is that competition forces the former to compete but not the latter.

So how would you introduce competition to public transit?

By privatizing the TTC? Naw. A private monopoly would only be marginally more effective than a public monopoly, especially if the toxic transit worker’s union goes along for the ride, as would most likely be the case. 

A simple way to introduce competition is to remove the TTC’s monopoly on multiple fares. Allow upstart bus companies to compete with the TTC for passengers and you will see TTC executives morph into second-rate Steve Jobs’ before your eyes.

The standard objection is that the TTC needs a monopoly because the monopoly profits on good routes subsidize money-losing off-hour routes. In other words, without a monopoly, the reasoning goes, the city would not enjoy round-the-clock transit service. Private companies would eagerly run buses during the passenger-rich rush hour but would ignore the all-night routes.

The proper answer to this is that running buses all night is grossly inefficient and shouldn’t be done in the first place. Instead of operating huge buses on an inflexible and intermittent schedule along a small number of routes, smaller vehicles (say 7 passenger minivans) operating more flexibly could be employed to take multiple fares from places where late night travellers are likely to congregate (say, bars, nightclubs, hospital emergency rooms, etc.) to or near their homes. They would work kind of like taxis but be cheaper because the cost of the driver is split among six fares instead of one. And this is just one idea off the top of my head. Likely, transit entrepreneurs will come up with many other creative solutions, each one cheaper or more convenient than the last. The point is that the TTC’s one-bus-fits-all-sizes approach is stupid and increasingly unaffordable. We don’t have to keep living with 1950’s solutions!

And if this sounds a bit too radical, then sort-of copy York Region, which has two bus companies (one private, one public), each running selected routes. I would add one extra step: every year, the service and cost of each company’s routes should be publicly compared - with routes added and subtracted from each company according to last year’s performance. Even this limited amount of competition should motivate the removal of a huge amount of bloat.

 

Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy

Via Instapundit, this video clip from Conan O’Brien putting all the pervasive doom and gloom mongering into perspective.

The guest (not sure who he is) channels exactly what I feel when I hear commentators, both on the left and the right, declare the end of the world. The miracle of modern civilization has spoiled us rotten. We have no clue how incredibly lucky we are to be living right now. 

(Incidentally, this is also the reason I want to smash Islamic fundamentalism: they are actively trying to destroy this miracle.)

 

The importance of physical strength as a virtue

Via Instapundit, this interesting article:

“The question was raised: Is physical strength the most important thing in life? (HT to Instapundit)

Most important may be not quite right; yet it's more important than ever, morally and even politically.

For a man, physical strength as a whole -- health, strength, energy, endurance, agility -- is the most foundational value.”

“Yes, love and spirituality (which are perhaps the same things) are at the apex. But without that physical presence, a man has trouble reaching those and other good things.

People won't take you seriously, if you don't have physical competence. You won't take yourself seriously. We are physical beings; and that physical presence imbues all we do.” 

“One day I was walking toward a store about the same time as a young woman of about 30. She got there first, opened the door, and held it wide open for me. I felt as I was hobbling up on a walker.

But I only got serious when I was operated on for kidney stones…. So let's just say I had the choice of being an old man, or, well, being an old guy, but a fit, capable one.”

As a lifelong fitness fanatic, I think Jim Tynen makes a good argument for moving the pendulum back from the abstract towards the physical. Our society in general, and the left in particular, constantly reveres the abstract over the physical. Up to a point this is OK but our society is long past that point.

Take for instance physical courage, something many liberals dismiss as a Neanderthal attribute. They are wrong. The military (and conservatives) are right to regard it very highly, even to the point of considering the most important of the noble traits. While it is true that you can be physically courageous and evil, it is also true that you cannot perform serious acts of goodness without bravery. That is because without courage, your intentions become irrelevant. Who cares what a coward believes in because he will cut and run when he faces a serious obstacle.

I also think physical courage is an important – but underappreciated – component of creativity. This is because doing something truly creative often takes real guts. Whether it is a climate scientist who challenges the global warming orthodoxy or Galileo facing off against the Church, championing new ideas over established ideas often means taking real risks, whether to tenure or even life and limb.