This is, of course, a rhetorical question, but one that comes honestly from from the large amount of rhetoric I hear.

This week we have heard the fallout from the Transit Commissioner audit of TransLink funding, used as support for refusing a fare increase to TransLink (wow, Stephen Rees cuts through that one like a laser here). TransLink says this is going to put the stops to any hope of improving or expanding service (not specifically true, as the modest fare increase would have only served to maintain service at current levels), while the tawlk radio pundits (including several members of the Mayor’s Council) are saying it is time for a re-think of the entire TransLink structure and system. All of them agree on one thing: There is no more money.

Then look at the headlines around the ongoing Teachers labour dispute. The Provincial Government has told teachers that the single largest component of their working conditions (class size) cannot be negotiated, because they have to control costs. Then they insist there will also be no negotiation on their wages. “Net Zero” they call it, the mandate for all public services. They went into “negotiations” with the teachers with a single message: There is no more money.

Our hospitals are overcrowded, Tim Horton’s being used for stockpiling emergency room patients, inadequate numbers of anaesthesiologists, and I can’t find a damn GP to take me on as a patient. We are contracting our our fundamental record keeping to foreign multi-nationals, and we can’t keep killer infections out of our aging hospital fleet. Whenever concerns about the fate of our healthcare system are raised to the senior governments, the answer is really simple: there is no more money

Apparently I will not be entitled to the same retirement income as my parents, or even my big brother, even though I have been employed and have paid into the system since I was neigh 16 years old. The Prime Minster made it perfectly clear, his Calgary School chums and the Fraser Institute projected out demographically to 2035, and guess what? There is no more Money.

The public broadcaster is cutting programs that tell us about the rest of the world, and about our own neighbourhoods. People who provide vital weather and other information in our vast North are being cut back, rationalized, shut down. People who protect our fisheries habitat, who inspect the safety of our food, and test our drinking water for dangerous substances are being laid off. Veterans who have fought in an ill-informed foreign war, only because we asked them to, are losing access to veterans services. People are living on the street and all three levels of government are pointing at each other and saying the same thing in unison: There is no more money.

Here I sit in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 2012. Apartments are selling out before they are built, at north of $1000 per square foot. The Canucks are entering their second decade of sold-out shows at $200 a seat. Ferraris and Lamborghinis are being driven by 16-year old street racers, and new BMWs are so thick on the streets they almost block the views from the $70,000 Deluxe Pick-up Trucks that burn a transit pass worth of gas travelling 15km. my office overlooks a mall parking lot, always full. People line up to purchase obscenely expensive speak-and-say toys every time Apple decides to change screen colours. The shelves at Safeway are packed with $9/pound organic guavas from antipodal farms, and we have to truck in boatloads of Guatemalans to serve us shitty coffee, because it just isn’t worth any Canadian’s time to do that work anymore. We spend a half Billion dollars to keep rain off of a couple of dozen football players, and now want to spend another $20+ Billion (no one apparently really knows how much) to destroy the air defenses of countries we haven’t even chosen yet… Everywhere I look, I see money. Embarrassing amounts of Money.

It seems we have more money for everything than we had 30 years ago, when my parents were raising me and my three siblings. My dad had a solid career job as a civil engineer, and could pay the mortgage and feed the family, and even took us on a couple of vacations. He didn’t have a BMW, but did drive a funky Dodge. We listened to CBC radio news and original broadcasting, watched Hockey and the Beachcombers and Sesame Street on CBC TV. My best friend’s dad was a teacher and his mom a nurse, and they had a decent home, three kids, and the mother of all station wagons. I don’t remember us accusing them of sucking off the public purse. My schools were decent, the hospital we lived next to had 24-hour emergency (it is closed now, and Castlegarians who have an accident have at least a 30-minute ambulance ride to the nearest emergency room). Was that an imaginary, nostalgic world I am remembering through rose-colored glasses?

Since then, the population has grown, the number of jobs has increased, the GDP has gone up. We sell more, do more and buy more now. We make more money every year than ever before: inflation adjusted, per capita, no matter how you measure it. We are a rich country, one of the richest in the world, and richer than we have ever been in history. Yet the essential services we rely on, the roads, the schools, the police, the hospitals, the low-income housing, the public broadcaster, are continually under threat from reduced funding.

The reason is always the same: There is no more money.

So where is all the money? Where the hell did it go?

You wouldn’t know it by looking at the Federal Budget released yesterday, but Anthropogenic Global Warming (or “Climate Change” as it is currently marketed) is still going on. Actually, there has been a disturbing trend recently of the scientific consensus moving away from “we really need to do something about this, soon” towards “it is looking like soon might be a little too late” as a series of “tipping points” related to polar ice loss, tropical forest desiccation, permafrost methane release, etc. seem to be arriving sooner than even the most alarming IPCC predictions from a few years ago. It appears climate change adaptation measures will soon be structured around small weapons practice and desert survival training.

Really, not much general interest about this issue, though. As some random drunk on CBC pointed out last year, the PR contest is over: reality lost.

This week, there was an excellent example of exactly how this battle has been lost.If you are a purveyor of the neo-Conservative Canadian Blogosphere, you might know that once again this week, AGW has been proven false. In this case because a study proved that the Medieval Warm Period was a global event and therefore Michael Mann was wrong, and therefore the whole house of cards is falling down. I hate to pick on one denier in particular This story is well covered by the erudite opinioneers at the provocatively-named “Small Dead Animals” blog. As is the norm, the link there is to a story at the #1 source for journalistic links for the denial crowd: the UK Daily Mail. That story can be read here, and of course, it does not link to the actual source of the science they are writing about. In fact, the headline of the story, and the headline of the Small Dead Animals post are in direct contrast to the statement in that very article by the scientist who authored the paper:

“Lu says that his research has no direct bearing on the current climate, and points out that his research is restricted to one area in Antarctica, and is not in itself proof that the whole Earth warmed up.”

Actually, the article so misrepresented the results of Lu’s study, and the Daily Mail is so pervasive in the Denial blogosphere, that Lu had to get a press release issued by his University indicating that the Daily Mail was flat wrong, and that his research said nothing like what the Daily Mail said it did. Will the Daily Mail print a retraction? Don’t hold your breath. This is the one paper that did not retract the ClimateGate story, even after every other media outlet did so following the numerous investigations in to the alleged “scandal”.

Instead, like ClimteGate, this will become one more little “fact” to use in the denial machine’s Gish Gallop assault on reason and reality, and the truth about AGW is made a little more difficult for the average non-engaged voter and tax-payer to understand.

It also makes one more noise to rattle around the echo-chamber that is the right-wing blogosphere, so they can use it in the long comment threads that reinforce their strange cognitive dissonance death march. Speaking of “Small Dead Animals”, it doesn’t appear any of the commenters there bothered to follow up to the source of the story, instead they just echo-chambered a bunch of other long-refuted “facts” (with occasional flogging of the ghost of Al Gore) to support their position. Nothing new presented, no new ideas offered, no links to sources of data, and no actual science to back their positions.

Well, I have to admit, to me, there was at least one new idea. This post is something I had not heard before (and a curious look into the mind of these people):

The Middle ages warm period caused enough surplus wealth that they built all the great Cathedrals of Europe, the french put a ban on the import of wine from Scotland, people in Britain were 2 or 3 inches taller in 1250 than they were in 1900. There is a huge civilizational advantage to warm weather.

Hmmm… Where to start. Let’s do this line by line.

The Medieval Warm Period was a northern Europe climate event over a 300-year span from about 950 to 1250. To say “all the great Cathedrals of Europe” were built during this time is, I guess, a matter of opinion around the word “great”, but by excluding all Gothic (Cologne, Notre Dame, Florence, Milan, Reims, Salsbury, Canterbury, Toledo, Burgos, etc.), Renaissance (St. Peters, San Georgio, etc.) and Baroque (St. Pauls) cathedrals from consideration, as they were built well after the MWP, mostly during the “Little Ice Age”, challenges the credibility of the statement.

The writer’s history of the wine trade between France and Scotland is also a little confused. It is pretty clear that through the Medieval, wine was imported to Scotland from France, up to and after the Auld Alliance, which was sealed just after the end of the MWP, and had more to do with pissing off the common enemy (England) than with climate changes. There is simply no evidence of widespread viticulture in Scotland during the MWP, he is making that shit up.

As for British people being taller in 1250 than in 1900, the evidence is the exact opposite ( see page 5 of this publication from some British Archaeologists who studied this exact question). Even if it were true (which it isn’t), it would be hard to argue that warm climates cause height, as 18 of the 20 “tallest countries” are in central or northern Europe, and 18 of the 20 “shortest” are in the tropics.

I’m not even sure what a “civilizational advantage” is. Presumably, he is arguing greater advancement in science, technology, health, and governance correlates with warm weather. Which is apparently why the Incas and Maya ran rampant through Northern Europe plundering resources in the 16th Century, and why the Great Nations of Africa held a conference in 1885 to decide how to break up and distribute the wealth of Europe and Asia amongst themselves.

So he (and yes, it is a “he”, no woman has ever been this self-convincingly stupid about everything) is factually wrong at every point, but what is his great idea? That AGW is good? Because he is commenting on an article that says (wrongly) that AGW is not happening. So is he refuting this? Why are the other commenters, who think this is all an Al Gore-led conspiracy to bring about world government or someother, not challenging him?

This is, unfortunately, the public discourse on AGW. This is what is driving us towards a pretty uncomfortable future when a much more comfortable alternative is available. I am not a defeatist, but I suspect Rex is right on this one: the PR battle is over, science lost, because their side was held back by engaging in reality.

I watched the NDP leadership race with a moderate amount of interest. Although I am a happy supporter of both New Westminster MPs, and I am increasingly of the opinion that Harper donated his heart to Cheney, I am not am member of the NDP, and honestly had not educated myself too much on the leadership contenders.

Up to this weekend, I was most impressed by Brian Topp, although Cullen made a strong case for leadership by naming Beastie Boys’ “Check your Head” as his favourite CD (a bold choice: more challenging than the obvious choice of their magnum opus “Paul’s Boutique”, or even “Hello Nasty”, although that might, admittedly, have been seen as a dig against Mulcair).

To see the Tyee calling Mulcair a “right-wing Liberal” and lamenting his “rigid fiscal conservatism” the same day that James Moore calls him a “Hard-Left Socialist” tells me the NDP have probably done a good job hitting the middle of the road, only time will tell how his leadership skills will hold up.

The more interesting aspect of the race for me was the on-line voting aspect. Remarkably, I agree almost 100% with this City Caucus article on how the on-line experience that the NDP had should serve as a warning to those who think we should all be voting on-line in local, Provincial, or Federal elections in Canada.

When I was finishing up my undergrad, I had a roommate who was doing his Ph.D in computing science. He was a scary-bright guy, but the model of the born-in-1975 computer geek. He is probably a millionaire now, but would have no idea what to do with it if he was. I had a memorable conversation with him one time, talking about school and learning and the Philosophy of Science (Never, and I repeat Never, read Robert Pirsig during the last semester of your Science degree…).

He felt the real problem with a Computing Science education is that they spend a lot of time teaching you to use a computer to solve a problem, without ever asking whether the computer is the right tool to solve the problem you have. This was a profound insight that always came back to me while dealing with transportation engineers who wanted to solve congestion by building more roads, or Politicians trying to solve crime by building more jails.

The question for me, when people talk about on-line voting, is “What problem are you trying to solve?” followed shortly by “Is the Internet the right tool to fix that problem?”

The main problem people seem to identify is “lack of engagement” in the process. Essentially, people have stopped showing up to vote. There is no doubt the proportion of the population that shows up for elections has been on a steady downward slide in the last few decades. Just over 60% of eligible Canadians voted in the last federal election, one where the result was far from foregone on election night. The turnout for the 2009 Provincial election was closer to 50%. To suggest that internet voting will solve this problem presumes that people are not voting because they are too busy in their day to take the two-block journey to their local polling place to make a ballot on election day, or that they are too lazy to get off the sofa and vote.

I suspect people are staying home for other reasons: lack of anyone they deem worth voting for, general disinterest or genuine disgust with the process, the feeling that it won’t make any difference. None of these will be solved by Internet Voting.

For major elections, everyone is guaranteed 4 work free-hours while the polls are open to exercise their franchise. There are also advance polls and absentee ballots. There are myriad options to cast your ballot. if you can’t figure out some way to get your vote counted, chances are you chose not to exercise your franchise. Internet voting will not solve this.

Yes, I am aware that there is a small proportion of the population with mobility issues who do find it difficult to get to a polling place, but this is surely not a significant proportion of the up to 50% of the voting age population that fails to vote. Still, there are numerous ways we can (and do) make it easier for people in this small group to vote – absentee ballots, rides to the polls, etc. Internet Voting is not the best way to mange this.

So what’s the problem with Internet Voting? As the NDP learned, we cannot even imagine. DNS and other hacking attacks are the obvious concern, and would likely result in people who want to vote actually losing their franchise (as apparently happened to some NDP Leadership Race voters. Then there is the “black box” concern about how the votes are counted, and how auditable the process will be. Balancing security of the secret ballot with the need for transparency of the final count (and re-counts) would be difficult challenge for any systems designer. The loss of either of those will reduce the confidence in the system, and likely worsen one cause of general disenchantment with the process.

I don’t think these programming problems are unsolvable, I just question why we want to go through the hassle of solving them with such a kludge solution as the Internet. Paper ballots work. If there is a problem in Canada’s electoral system, it isn’t the paper the ballot is written on.

Oh, and Cullen? he’s so wrong. Paul’s Botique is totally where it’s at

Beastie Boys – Shake Your Rump by EMI_Music