BLOG THIS | blog.thismagazine.ca: January 2007 Archives

Last month I posted about the net neutrality fight in the U.S., and noted in an update that Canadians couldn’t sign the petition set up by the Save The Internet campaign urging the U.S. Congress to legislate against a two-tiered Internet.

Since then The Tyee has picked up on this blind spot north of the border, writing recently that the fight is just as relevant in Canada, and that we may actually be in worse shape because the growing Internet inequalities are going largely unnoticed:

Just like in the States, net neutrality in Canada hovers in a state of legal limbo; the threadbare language of the Telecommunications Act means that two-tier Internet is more than a distant possibility; it’s already here.

“I think it’s already happening now but for the most part people don’t recognize it,” says [professor Michael] Geist, who is based at the University of Ottawa.

But they did not, strangely, pick up on our John Degen’s Deadwood analogy.

While I can appreciate that this fight wouldn’t be nearly as big without the self-interested businesses on the ‘support net neutrality’ side, for independent web publishers and new media users concerned about a diversity of voices, this may be the best opportunity to make a case to regulators while their attention is caught by big players.

From what The Tyee reports it appears Industry Minister Maxime Bernier is so far only responsive to big telecommunications companies, but at netneutrality.ca you can sign a petition (scroll all the way down) and get a button for your website to show you support a free and equal internet for all.

More entries on: Interweb

January 25, 2007

Panhandling bans don't make sense

Posted by annette at 11:04 AM ET | Comments (3)

Good editorial in the Toronto Star today about a proposal to ban panhandling in Toronto. It calls the proposal "ill-conceived...on several fronts." Which it is, really.

Personally, I don't get the logic behind such a ban. Yes, panhandlers make tourists uncomfortable and citizens feel guilty. But what's the point of fining people who have no means to pay? Will meaningless tickets really deter them from panhandling in high-traffic areas?

More importantly, why focus energy on sweeping the problem under the carpet instead of pushing for real solutions like more affordable housing?

For proposals that do make sense, in my humble opinion, check out the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee's "One Percent Solution." Along with a description of the plan, there's also link to endorse the solution online.

More entries on: Human rights

January 17, 2007

Scotiabank takin' on the US Treasury

Posted by john_d at 09:53 AM ET | Comments (3)

CBC.ca is reporting that Scotiabank will not be following the lead of the apparently powerless Royal Bank in denying US dollar bank accounts to dual citizens of Canada and a bunch of nations the US does not like. Canadian citizens who also hold passports for Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Myanmar, Sudan and Cuba may not save US dollars at the Royal Bank, because of its compliance with a US Treasury directive to deny access to US currency to them there folks.

Scotiabank will probably have to dig into the record-profit pool all Canadian banks enjoy to pay some American fines as a result of their principled stand, but they have apparently decided that is a small price to pay for continuing to do business in a way consistent with another American directive, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1975, which states that when you apply for credit, a creditor may not discourage you from applying because of your sex, marital status, age, race, national origin, or because you receive public assistance income.

More entries on: Activism

January 12, 2007

Birds Who Rap and Other Stories

Posted by mason at 12:38 PM ET | Comments (1)

I’m a little late getting to this, but a BBC blog called Magazine Monitor released a fascinating list at the end of last year: 100 things we didn’t know last year. Among my favourite tidbits, all of which are certainly worthy of their own entry:

3. Urban birds have developed a short, fast “rap style” of singing, different from their rural counterparts. [Link]

5. Standard-sized condoms are too big for most Indian men. [Link]

23. More than one in eight people in the United States show signs of addiction to the internet, says a study. [Link] (Ahem... who are these people?)

57. The word “time” is the most common noun in the English language, according to the latest Oxford dictionary. [Link]

68. The egg came first. [Link]

76. In Bhutan, government policy is based on Gross National Happiness; thus most street advertising is banned, as are tobacco and plastic bags. [Link]

87. Goths are likely to become doctors, lawyers and architects. [Link]

90. The Himalayas cover one-tenth of the Earth’s surface. [Link]

More entries on: Generally Interesting

January 09, 2007

If Sarah Harmer tells me to not like gravel, should I not like it?

Posted by john_d at 03:15 PM ET | Comments (2)

Judging by my own and my friends' reaction to every new album, I am Sarah Harmer's core audience demographic. I pay to download her music. I buy her CDs as gifts for friends. I have attempted to fit one of her rare live TO performances into my very busy life. I quote her lyrics in my writing. Way back when, I used to go see the Saddletramps, and even put together an arts benefit with them at Lee's Palace. That's right, the Saddletramps. Deal with that, youth of today. Finally, day after day, I bother my work associate with Escarpment Blues, a Harmer song, because I love it and can't stop listening to it on my iTunes. I'm listening to it right now.

So, naturally when I saw Ms. Harmer on the cover of NOW, I stopped and made the purchase (I know, NOW is free, but I feel I leave a bit of my soul behind whenever I pick up Toronto's "alternative" paper -- just a personal opinion).

Harmer's activism is the focus of the NOW piece, specifically her campaign to save the Niagara Escarpment from an aggregate company's expansion. It seems Nelson Aggregate Co. intends to expand their current diggings into the escarpment to help supply the ever increasing market for crushed rock to Toronto's building boom. The inevitable local advocacy group has sprung up to question the environmental impact of the scheme, as they should. Harmer is this group's very public face -- check them out on their own website: Protecting Escarpment Rural Land.

After doing my own reading on the issue, I lean toward Sarah Harmer (surprise, surprise) yet the NOW article continues to nettle me and make me wonder about the whole idea of celebrity advocacy, or at least the need for responsible media coverage of celebrity advocacy. Read by anyone less enamoured with Harmer's talents as singer/songwriter, the piece might come across as pretty flakey NIMBYism tarted up as genuine environmental concern. The article begins with a dreamy Harmer gazing off into the distance, past picturesque Mount Nemo to that soulless Babylon, Toronto, and its inexhaustible hunger for Burlington gravel. Except that she's doing her gazing from her parents' farmhouse, and the quarry in question is almost literally in their backyard. Here's the next bit:

A country block up the road, across lush, green wetlands, great smoky machines dig and chew, turning rock into gravel that's used to build highways and condos and, yes, parking lots.

Mount Nemo is on the ragged spine of the Niagara Escarpment, which stretches 725 kilometres from Niagara Falls to Tobermory, and has a heart shape when seen from above. At the centre of that heart, amid the streams, ponds and woodlands that rare and endangered plants and animals like the Jefferson salamander and butternut tree call home, is a limestone quarry, one of 44 such pits that dot the escarpment like a pox. Ironically, Harmer points out, "quarry" is derived from "cor," the Latin word for heart.

Oh, come on. A pox on glaringly unbalanced reporting propped up with strained poetics.

Nelson Aggregate, judging by local media reports, has not been the best neighbour to the good folks of Burlington, but they make a compelling enviro-argument for expanding the quarry closest to the Toronto market. From their website:

If that same quantity of aggregate had to come from the next closest area of significant aggregate reserves (about 30km further), the additional truck transport to get the same amount of aggregate delivered to where it is needed in the market, would result in:

95,000 tonnes of extra greenhouse gases
34.5 million litres of extra fuel consumption
$162 million in extra transport costs (at today's cost)
72 million extra heavy truck kilometers

All of those impacts would be incurred just to transport the same quantity of aggregate to the same market area from a bit further away.

Who's right; who's wrong? The lilting voice of Sarah Harmer leads me to think that quarries may just be a pox on the landscape, dammit! yet all the NOW article has done is make me wonder if I'm being lulled by pretty music into supporting the opening of a new quarry in someone else's less famous backyard.

More entries on: Activism

January 08, 2007

One Laptop per Child

Posted by mason at 01:29 PM ET | Comments (5)

After years of planning and much anticipation, 2007 looks to be the year the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project begins distributing its ground-breaking, $100 portable computers to children in developing countries.

A spinoff of MIT labs founded by Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC aims to give the world’s poorest children access to a valuable learning tool at a low cost. Unlike other laptops, the so-called XO machines will be cheap to manufacture, energy efficient and run on an open-source operating system called Sugar. Developed from the ground up for kids with no prior computer-use experience, Sugar eschews folders and windows in favour of icons and simple networking that encourage collaboration and task-based file retrieval.

The machines themselves will have no hard drive (just external memory) and a dual-mode display that can appear in black-and-white monochrome and is readable in sunlight with very little power use. They will be sturdy and adaptable for different uses, and OLPC boasts that they will be able to do everything a regular computer can do except store large amounts of data.

But perhaps the most exciting part of the project is how the computers will find their way into children’s hands. Instead of selling them directly to users, OLPC is working with ministries of education, who will buy them in bulk and distribute them to children like textbooks. The XO machines will be the child’s to keep. Brazil, Nigeria and Pakistan are among the countries already involved, and this week Rwanda also signed on to the initiative. Children in these countries and others are slated to begin testing the computers and operating system by the middle of this year.

It’s an exciting project, and it’s gaining momentum. Popular Science magazine included OLPC in its Best of What’s New 2006, and partners in the project include Google, Red Hat, and News Corp.

More entries on: Interweb

January 02, 2007

what if the awesome power of WalMart were used for good?

Posted by john_d at 10:19 AM ET | Comments (4)

From today's New York Times -- what if WalMart forced Americans to drastically reduce their energy consumption? Would we like the megacorp a little bit more than we currently do? Even just a little bit?

WalMart Pushes Energy Efficient Light Bulbs on a Reluctant Population

More entries on: Planet Earth

Previous month: December 2006
Next month: February 2007

THIS MAGAZINE. BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL

Please note that all writers hold the copyright for their pieces and it is illegal for any portion of them to be copied or distributed without their expressed permission. So please don't steal.

THIS MAGAZINE: BECAUSE EVERTHING IS POLITICAL

January 26, 2007

Canada's net neutrality failure