Blog Notes

First off, Timmy, Pogge, Jonathan and Mahigan have combined forces over at pogge's house. They're all great bloggers in their own right, so the combination should make for an entertaining blog.

Also, the dropdown boxes continue their slow but steady march as I gradually try to make my blog function as a web portal for myself. The latest addition links to the 'headquarters' of various blogging alliances so if you're looking for more blogs to read that's a good place to look. I found it interesting that the Progressive Blogger's homesite has adopted a bit of a Daily-KOS, community style approach in which people can register for an account and write diaries on the site even if they don't have their own blog. It will be interesting to see if traffic trends in Canada follow the American example (with big, community oriented 'left-wing' blogs outstripping the traffic of the big 'right-wing' blogs) or find their own path.

Finally, some unrelated movie notes:

1) I saw the movie 'Hitch' (with Will Smith) the other day.

2) As per my commentary here I highly recommend that Simon go rent this movie. It's great. You'll really enjoy it. Honest.

3) Movie ticket sales in the U.S. are down 9% vs. the same point last year.

Keeping Transaction Costs Down*

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that the Chinese government is following the B.C. government's trailblazing example and requiring people to register their blogs with the government.

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Meanwhile, pogge takes up a task I considered but rejected, mocking the hyperbolic language of the Chamber of Commerce in this National Post story.

My favourite line from the Chamber was, "To say that program spending is out of control would be an understatement,"

When supposedly serious bodies like the Chamber of Commerce mistake the word 'understatement' for the word 'exaggeration', you can almost see their credibility dropping away - an aspect of this which Rob at 'One Damn Thing After Another' makes some good points about as well.

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Finally, I agree entirely with Andrew Spicer's take on some possible amendments to the Same Sex Marriage legislation aimed at placating the 'social conservatives' in the Liberal caucus. What he said.

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* A popular theory (generally attributed to economist Ronald Coase) holds that organizational size depends on transaction costs. If transactions between different parties have a high cost then it makes sense to get rid of the transaction cost by controlling both sides of the transaction. In this modern age with low transaction costs, one would expect companies to begin to shrink accordingly (since there are no longer as many situations where it is more efficient to have both sides of a transaction in-house).

Similarly, there is a certain amount of overhead in writing a blog post (coming up with a title, and pressing the publish button mainly). So when the individual entries are small enough, it makes sense to lump them together so as to keep the ratio of the transaction cost / to the cost of the post itself down to a reasonable level.

CEO overpay cons

It's always interesting to see what searches bring people to this site. So far my favourite was a recent visitor who searched for "CEO overpay cons" - a search for which this site comes up a respectable 8th on google.

In honour of that search I direct your attention to this post by pogge in which he rightly takes Thomas d'Aquino (president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives) to task for his hysterical, hyperbolic reaction to the deal between Paul Martin and Jack Layton to cancel corporate tax cuts in the federal budget.

Says Thomas,

"By reneging on the corporate tax cuts in the 2005 budget, the deal announced today will sacrifice Canada's ability to foster more high-paying jobs and to ensure that our economy grows fast enough to pay for the massive federal commitments to expanding social programs and equalization payments,"

As pogge notes, given that the federal corporate tax rate has already been reduced from 28% to 21% since 2000, it seems a bit absurd for supposedly serious people to be making statements that not cutting the rate further for a few years is going have some huge negative impact on our economy.

Personally, I think Paul Martin should have stuck to his guns on this one, and on principle I worry about deals which increase spending but don't increase revenue to pay for it (the spending occurs now while the corporate tax cuts didn't take effect for a few years - and Martin is now telling the Conservatives he's going to go ahead with the cuts anyway), but we're not talking about a huge amount of money on the scale of the federal government and it would be nice to discuss it like adults rather than having flacks like d'Aquino making ridiculous statements with no connection to reality.

Sponsorship Scandal

I meant what I said earlier about this being a dull topic for me, but it's important enough in it's (potential) impact on Canadian politics that it's worth a post, so I'm going to take the easy way out here.

The best mainstream report on the 'explosive' testimony of Jean Brault at the Gomery Inquiry was the 4 part story in the Globe.

The best commentary on the web was from pogge, who has an interesting take with lots of good comments. I don't agree with his assessment that Martin should resign. I figure he called the inquiry so we could find out the truth, and it will be up to the voters to decide how much they want to punish the Liberals for their mafia-like antics which wasted a total of at least $5 of each taxpayers money over a 10 year stretch.

I agreed more with James Bow who posted his opinion at the e-group that, under the circumstances the Green Party looks like the best bet for the next election. Of course I voted Green last election, so it's not a big surprise that I agree with that assessment.

So that's enough about that.

This and That

Over at Polspy, Sean asked the question, "Is it possible to be a Conservative and an environmentalist at the same time, or are the two mutually exclusive?" and got some interesting (and some silly) replies.

My favourite came from Ray who said,

"Of course it is possible to be conservative and an environmentalist, as easily is it is to be conservative and gay, though Scott Brison might disagree with me. ...

[big chunk omitted - go read his comment in full] ...

Grizzlies are in an endangered state, eagles are being butchered for cash, but the single most contentious issues in Ottawa are whether or not gays will be allowed to marry or whether Canada will support a program it is already in to help the Americans shoot rockets that don't fly to defend us against missiles that don't exist.

It's wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong."

My personal opinion, as I commented, is that if we're talking big C Conservative (i.e. the political party not the philosopy) then it is possible, but they sure aren't making it easy.

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Meanwhile, at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has a thoughtful post up on the general trend towards democracy over the last 50 years and how the invasion of Iraq may have impacted it.

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And finally, something I was not only slow in posting about, I was even slow in linking to Pogge when he posted about, was a pair of columns in the Toronto Star by Thomas Walkom about the erosion of civil liberties and the privacy of our information in this post 9/11 security legislation environment. Both are worth a read, unless you prefer to remain in a good mood, in which case give them a pass.