In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
Murray Langdon of Victoria area radio and news outfit CFAX talks about municipal golf courses and tries to connect the Municipality of Saanich’s role in running a golf course with a much larger question around government, and “money”.
I’ve already been inundated with a ream of people who have stated that rec centres, garbage pick-up, landscaping, etc, has always been done by the municipality. That may be true. What I’m asking is should cities and towns be doing that. For example, we know that rec centres lose money each and every year…
The role of government, whatever level it might be, is to maximise the welfare of the people it serves, not some of its people, but most of them. So, looking at government “costs” alone in deciding the role of government is dangerously incomplete. What you actually have to do is to total up the costs for government and the people being served by the government, and judge whether there is an overall benefit to a municipality providing a service. Trying to be pragmatic about it, here are some of the things I look at:
Is the good/service provided discretionary? Meaning, would I be able to live a reasonably satisfactory life without the service?
If the good/service is non-discretionary ( I need it for a satisfactory life), then does it show characteristics of moral hazard (if some people don’t participate, it affects everyone), and would the provision of the service benefit from risk pooling (it works better if we’re all in it together) and mitigate issues of adverse selection (people who need services most are least able to afford them)?
Is the good/service market amenable? (despite what free market fundamentalists may have you believe, Adam Smith did not think that every good/service could fit into a free market paradigm). If market worthy, is there any additional benefit to having a “public option”?
What parts of a good/service are a natural monopoly, and what parts are amenable to market based competition (highways vs. cars)?
When looking at costs and benefits, it’s not enough just look at direct costs like construction, salaries, etc, but also at more intangible measures like decision fatigue,(after a certain threshold, every decision you take degrades the next one) social capital (community relations, cooperation and confidence), creative capital (the ability to attract people to your community), environmental capital and so much more.
Immediately, dumping golf, recreation, and water and sewage services into the same pot makes no sense.
Let’s look at golf, it’s discretionary, and given the proliferation of golf courses in the area, a reasonably competitive good/service (disclaimer: I don’t golf). If Saanich stopped providing golf services, some people would end up paying more, but this would not affect a vast majority of people in the area. So, I wouldn’t shed a tear if Saanich’s golf course was privatised (I would be happier if it became a park, but that’s a different argument!).
Let’s look at recreation centres – Murray Langdon says this:
For example, we know that rec centres lose money each and every year. But we have examples of private recreation facilities, (in Langford for example) that are not only affordable but actually make money. For some reason, people assume that if it’s not run by a municipality, it will be expensive. Well, I have news for you. It is expensive and it may be because it’s run by a municipality.
I am confused, what Langford recreation centre is he talking about? (I don’t live in Langford, or hardly ever visit) The Westshore Parks and Rec Society runs the recreation centres, and it appears to be a joint effort by Westshore communities.
West Shore Park & Recreation is governed by the West Shore Parks & Recreation Society’s Board of Directors Each municipalities contribution, through tax requisition, assists in the operation of the parks and recreation facilities.
Putting Langford aside, clearly, the public health benefits of increased physical activity make exercise a non-discretionary item (some may disagree!) Community based (whether run by the municipality or not) recreation centres have many benefits that are not measured just by their profit-loss statements. They are often the only option for family-centric, community centric (as opposed to individual centric) recreation. I can’t go to a private gym with my partner (real) and kids (hypothetical), and have all of us participate in activities at the same time. My partner and I would have to schedule different workouts, then enrol the progeny in a separate swimming or soccer class, find/take turns in baby sitting, etc. So, not having community based recreation increases costs to society + government, while possibly (and not always) reducing government “costs”. The social capital of having community recreation centres, the public health benefits of encouraging exercise, I could go on, the intangible benefits are high. The YMCA, which I am a member of, is a non-profit community run recreation centre, and this model works as well.
Water and Sewer – These are non-discretionary, monopoly driven services not really market based. Construction, some maintenance, value added services, may be amenable to competition, but not the management, oversight and long-term stewardship. While the BC provincial government and various Federal governments have been trying to privatise various commons resources, third-party evidence points to no cost savings.
The job of a public policy analyst is to consider the costs/benefits of the society as a whole. One does not read government balance sheets the same way one would read a corporation’s balance sheet.
To nobody’s surprise, Facebook, just like any other entity selling you stuff, or selling you to people who sell you stuff is trying to connect more and more sets of previously unconnected data. This particular case deals with brick and mortar store data that is linked with customers’ email addresses and loyalty cards.
Facebook will be using Datalogix to prepare reports for its advertisers about who, if anyone, bought more of their stuff after they ran ads on the social network. But by matching your Facebook profile with your CVS bill, this means that Facebook has the potential to know some of your most intimate details (my, that’s a lot of bunion cream you’re buying!), and the privacy concerns are enormous. When DoubleClick attempted something similar to this, user-backlash ultimately led them to cancel the project.
Corporations (more than government, open data activists!) have been deep mining our data for years. It is part of creating the information asymmetry that enables profits to be made. You may remember this story about Target (coming to Canada as soon as we can learn to say Tarjay) and how they outed a teen’s pregnancy.
About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
Companies’ ability to reduce us to a shopping probability statistic is only going to get better as they learn to connect more of our data and computing gets faster. Can regulation keep up? Can customer outrage keep up with companies offering us coupons to keep us temporarily happy as impulse centres in our brain are carefully triggered for profit? Can customer outrage even keep up with the barrage of occurrences?
Receipt 2.0
I don’t think we can keep up. So, I want my data. I want information on what I bought, when I bought it, where I bought it in a standardized open data format. No, not a paper receipt, not a paper receipt scanner, but something that can be beamed to my phone, or emailed to me. I want to know when I buy coffee. Can I correlate my shopping habits with my mood? Do I buy more random electronics when I need a pick me up? What is the spread in the price I paid for my favourite cereal? Do some stores price it differently on Wednesdays? I want apps that can mine my data and tell me where to buy my cereal, or when not to buy. I want apps that can tap into a product database and give me a carbon footprint, or a fair trade pass/fail, or a local product breakdown.
Also, I do not want to re-enter the same bits of data multiple times and increase error. A payment made to my dentist should be sent directly to my extended health “insurance” provider for a refund. It should also go to my tax receipts virtual pile and await reimbursement. Any tax deductions can easily be tagged and directly entered into my tax preparation software at the end of the year. if I want to expense something for work, I should just be able to tag them and send them along. I can’t imagine how much time and effort this will save in error checking, manual entry, auditing, so much more.
Some of this is possible with systems like Mint, but they operate on a payment level, not on a line item level.
The new mobile payment system Square (not in Canada yet) shows some potential, so does Intuit’s GoPayment, which is available in Canada. But these payment systems emphasize ease of payment on both sides of the transaction, not the ability to mine our own data.
Can this happen via the market with no regulatory push? I don’t see how. Reducing information asymmetry is not in corporations’ interest. So it will have to be regulated. You have our data, just give it to us.
Not to mention, this is the “free market” way to go. Think of all the innovation that can be unleashed on the consumer side. Think of the apps that can provide better financial advice, the apps that can collate data at city/regional level and help consumers make better decisions.
Will companies have to spend money to make this happen? Yes. This will not be challenging for larger companies who already spend millions deep-mining our data. What about small business? This is where small tweaks to new systems like Square or GoPayment can be the game changer. Square already charges less for a swipe than a typical Visa transaction. So, I would see local business as saving money. When I buy local, I usually feel a bit more connection with the product. Imagine seeing my decision reinforced by data from Receipt 2.0. Small local business cannot data mine, but can generate enough goodwill with local consumers to get access to their data. Unlike Target, when my corner soap store does something unethical with my data, they cannot survive the bad publicity.
Are there privacy concerns? Yes. But our privacy is already compromised the minute we pay anything other than cash, or use the internet (Tor users, stop smirking). Good regulation can address most concerns.
My information is being used to make me a consume more, I want it to make me a better “consumer”. Open data efforts have focused intensely on public and government data, while privacy activists have tried unsuccessfully to stop private data gathering. I would like open data advocates to look carefully at liberating corporate mined data as well.
From the very awesome Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Website, a reminder that income inequality causes more super villains than science, and mashing DNA 🙂 Canada’s Conference Board, which no one would accuse of being socialist, came up with a report yesterday flagging growing inequality in Canada. They flagged inequality as “raising questions of fairness”, and declared it of “moral concern”.
They are late to the party. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has been on this beat for years, and has an ongoing project called The Growing Gap about income inequality. Go read The Spirit level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Inequality Trust in the UK for an epidemiological look at inequality and various social conditions.
Just wanted to share the awesome cartoon, that’s all 🙂
Before I begin, I use the word “car” to describe all passenger-first vehicles regardless of their design and so-called market segment. Whether it’s a sedan, hatchback, or an SUV, or one of those ridiculous two rows of seats “pickup” truck designs with a short and almost useless flatbed, they are primarily used to transport people and so they are all cars to be regulated as passenger vehicles. Also, electric or fossil, these issues don’t change.
Access to deadly devices. I see a car as a deadly device, a gun we use to travel around in, which kills unless operated almost perfectly. Who can access a car? How do we control access to a car?
Speed and Proximity. Any speed greater than 50 kph leads to almost certain death. So how do we control speed? The closer cars and drivers get to vulnerable people, the more likely they are to hurt them. Cities, downtowns and other dense spaces have many people walking and biking about, and cars pose much more danger than on a freeway.
Design. The heavier and taller a vehicle, the more likely it is to kill. If a subcompact car is a pistol, a large passenger “truck” car is an AK47. So how do we control car design?
Human skill and attitude. Driverless car hype aside, cars are operated by humans. The more unskilled, distracted, angry they are, the more likely they are to kill
Necessity and frequency of use. The more people are forced to use killing devices for transport, the more likely they are to kill people.
The system. We currently assume that use of killing devices by untrained amateurs as transportation is normative. This is the default way to be, and any changes to the default are catastrophic. People call this motonormativity, car brain, you pick the term.
If you were not motonormative, how would you tackle this issue of car violence?
Access
Right now, car access works as follows. You pass a one-time driving test in a country in your teens. That gives you access to drive most passenger vehicles anywhere in the country for the rest of your life (and in many cases, other countries too). Yes, your license can be suspended for various reasons. But that does not prevent you from driving a car, it only prevents you from driving one legally. So, we have hundreds of instances every year of people who are not allowed to drive hurting others with their cars. This is not an actual restriction of access, it’s administrative.
Solution: Take the next logical step. Tie car access to a functioning license. The technological solution is as simple as installing one more security system that does not allow a car to start/move unless a valid license is tapped or inserted. This way, people with suspended licenses will not be able to drive unless they take extreme measures. If someone is in a mental health crisis, then instead of jailing them on suspicion, you simply restrict access to deadly devices just like you would restrict access to a gun, or sharp knives. This is not a 100% stop as there will be exceptions (steal a license, hack the car, get an enabler), but it will stop most access issues. You could get more nuanced and tie certain cars to certain licenses as well, that way if you don’t want your car to be driven by anyone else than yourself, you implement strict access control. This way, you give people with mental health issues, or substance issues the time it takes for them to get help while restricting their access to dangerous devices, not their entire freedom.
Speed
Right now, cars are designed to go 3-4 times faster than kill speed with no physical restrictions (armed and dangerous). Once again, restrictions like speed limits are just administrative. Most humans don’t comply, and inappropriate speed is a major factor in auto violence. Cars are also almost always allowed in very crowded spaces where they are operated near vulnerable people.
Solutions: These solutions sound draconian if you are in car culture. Remember, in addition to being a transport device, the car is also a killing device. You’re driving around in a gun! Speed restrictions are linked to proximity. The closer you are to people on bikes and on foot, the slower the top-speed on your vehicle needs to be. And this is a technological speed limit, not an administrative one. We have the technology to tie speed limiters in cars to GPS. Why, we even restrict ebikes to 32 kmph currently. Even though imperfect, this could be a starting point. I would go a step further. All cars are, by default, in “city” mode. That means their speeds are capped to a max of 25-50 kmph depending on location. I would start with a 30 kmph default maximum and have GPS-linked increases up to 50 in places where there are fewer people walking. Then, when you are on a highway you press the highway or speed button to allow the car to go faster in places where it is less likely to encounter vulnerable people. Highway speeds are hard-capped at 10 kmph above the maximum speed limit in the country in addition to being limited by GPS. We will need a way to light up a car very prominently to display its highway/speed status, and ways to disable back to city mode if activated in the city. If a vehicle is seen in a city on speed/highway mode, the assumption is that it’s armed and dangerous. The status quo, remember, is all cars are armed and dangerous! Tie this to robust and affair utomated enforcement with speed cameras, radar etc. so the police can’t choose not to enforce traffic laws (like they are currently doing in Victoria BC)
Proximity
The more people walking/biking in an area, the greater your access restriction to cars and the tighter the speed control. Whether it is creating car-free streets, adding congestion tolls to cities and busy neighbourhoods, or putting up real barriers to prevent access during a festival/gathering, the goal is to greatly reduce the interactions between killing devices and unarmed people. There is so much work going on in this space, the 15 minute city for example is one such framework to think about design that minimizes deadly car interactions.
Car design
This one is simple. Cars cannot be allowed for sale if they are too tall, or too heavy. Cars are not cellphones, they have to be regulated with safety as the overwhelming priority. The safety approval process must take equal care of people outside the car, not just inside. There’s overwhelming evidence (and physics) that shows large cars like “trucks” or “SUVs” cause disproportionate harm. If you need to carry more people, design appropriately to bring the harm levels back to baseline car. There is also the disturbing trend of touchscreen menu-based interfaces for cars that is terribly unsafe. All of these need changing.
Driver skill and attitude
This is tied to access and design. If you think of the car as a gun, then it should horrify you that amateurs with one-time testing and no continuing professional development are allowed unlimited access to cars. Driving a car is a cognitively demanding task, and research shows that any level of distraction away from simply driving on a highway with no people and no distraction increases risk. Given that, it’s quite amazing more people are not hurt more often. It is proof that most people are working hard to do the right thing and concentrating on driving most of the time. It is clearly not enough. People have suggested more frequent retesting may help, continuing education as well. But ensuring driver licenses aren’t just pieces of plastic would go a long way. Same with driver attitude. When you’re performing a cognitively demanding task, you must stay calm. Unfortunately, the act of driving in proximity to hundreds of other drivers you don’t know and can’t communicate with increases stress in an already distrustful and dangerous environment, hence the common road rage issues. Add in the unpredictability and extra difficulty level of negotiating crowded urban streets, it’s all so demanding. Some of this can be handled through access restriction, some through speed control. However, the underlying issue is that driving is stressful and causes stress. Even with all the tools of so called “self-driving”, anything other than complete attention is dangerous. So you have to address necessity and frequency
Necessity and frequency, and the system.
Many books have been written on this topic. So I won’t go into much detail. For example, Life After Cars, or Car Free Cities, and so many more. The overarching point here is to reduce the necessity and frequency of private driving by designing our living and working systems appropriately. For example, I have a car, but I use it maybe once a week on a longer office drive (which I would not need to if we had a better transit system), or for getting into nature quickly. The rest of the time, most of what I need is within a 10 minute sweat free ebike ride: Groceries, medical appointments, kids school etc.
Needless to say, each of these interventions major and minor face a motonormative culture and entrenched opposition. So expect none of them except possibly the system design (which is happening in many places).
Donald Shoup, the author of the high cost of free parking and a god-like figure in the urban circles that look at parking in cities/towns and say “too much, too cheap!” (we’re very popular at parties) died recently. His death reminded me that for a while now, I have wanted to talk about Victoria’s strange and ridiculous neighbourhood resident parking system that rewards already wealthy people with free public land to store their personal belongings.
I’ve always lived close enough to downtown that the parking spots in front of my home had been restricted, either no parking or two hour parking. So I hadn’t really paid much attention to the resident parking rules except to know when I could get away with parking in a residential zone for a few minutes. That changed when I moved to North Park and discovered that around the corner from our new place, I could leave my car parked with zero restrictions, all the time! So, I was curious and started ducking (is that what you say when you use Duckduckgo?!) to see how I could get a permit? Turns out, there are no permits! And it’s FREE! You park your car on your block till someone complains about you, then parking enforcement gives you a ticket. You appeal this ticket with documentary proof of your address, and voila, ticket is rescinded and your license plate is entered into the system. WHAT?!
First off, FREE? Parking especially in Victoria is a scarce commodity, and the people who live in these blocks are already either relatively well-off (relative, don’t compare yourself to the Westons!) or renting from the wealthy. Resident blocks are typically found only in what we call “residential” neighbourhoods, and by residential we mean single family home-heavy, not rental building with hundreds of residents. This is a massive subsidy. In my neighourhood, I see commercial parking advertised for 250-300$ a month. Perhaps there’s less demand in Rocklands, but at a minimum, that’s approximately 160 sq feet (or 15 m^2) of public land that’s paved, maintained and given over to store your stuff (if your stuff is a car, good luck if it’s a tent and you want shelter) for free!
Secondly, a SNITCH DRIVEN SYSTEM? Someone’s neighbour with little better to do has to complain and then we waste city resources on writing a ticket, sending one, an appeals process, all of which is time spent by a city official that generates cost and no revenue? Where does this money come from? I presume from property taxes?
At a time when we’re struggling to pay for the mandatory police-dominated municipal budget and everything else that needs building and maintaining, why are we giving away storage on public space for free? We need to start the discussion around what’s appropriate payment for a resident to store their car in a well-maintained public space. Given it’s not guaranteed parking I guess it can’t be $300 a month which is full retail value, but some reasonable fraction right? Remember that in most of these neighbourhoods, your home already has a garage that’s meant for car storage but has been repurposed as extra house because you can store your car for free. Even if we start at a $200 per year, that gives a permit to hang in the car/sticker so we can stop this snitch-based enforcement mechanism.
Anyway, nothing’s likely to happen given how loud the people who own homes and thus assume ownership of the free parking in front of their homes get, and how afraid councillors are of loud home owners. But I’m still going to advocate for a better system when I talk to someone on council next. Donald Shoup would insist!
Anyway, the always excellent SIdewalking blog has a very informative post on the same issue, check that one out too!
I have been MOOC’ing this summer and learning how to do maps. Geography as an adult is much more fun than my 10th grade geography class.
Chad Skelton over at the Vancouver Sun intrigued me with his data retrieval and mapping of British Columbia’s Smart Meter uptake. if you’re not from BC, here’s a short intro (#BCpoli-aware feel free to skip the next two paragraphs).
BC Hydro is the government owned (Crown Corporation) utility that produces and distributes electricity for the province of British Colombia in Canada. In 2011, BC Hydro announced its intention to spend $$$ upgrading all its electricity meters to “smart meters”. These meters are capable of being read via wifi by meter readers, and potentially also give BC residents the ability to monitor their electricity usage in near-real time.
Many concerns were raised about the smart meters. One was about the costs of the program vs. perceived benefits. The others, which gained traction were around an emerging movement in BC connecting wifi, cell signals and wifi-enabled smart meters with a whole variety of health effects. While few, if any of these health concerns have been actually causally linked to smart meters, or even to the amorphous descriptor “wifi radiation”, these health concerns have gained traction even among official bodies such as the Union of BC Municipalities, municipal councils and school boards. The BC provincial election in 2013 was a chance for people to voice their concerns. The opposition parties all brought the issue up during canvassing.
For my peer assessment mapping project, I wanted to see if areas of relatively high smart meter refusal were correlated or co-located in any way with voting against the ruling BC Liberals.
This is the map I made, my first ever map not scrawled on paper.
The electoral districts are colour-coded by BC Liberal Party percentage, darker means higher vote for the BC Liberals. I chose this rather than “who won” because I was looking more for an anti-BC Liberal effect. I will, at some point in time, try to overlay “who won” as well. The smart meter refusal data is in three different coloured and sized circles. Large and red means higher refusal, and small and green means low refusal. This is a hybrid of a graduated circle symbol scheme and a diverging colour scheme. Clearly, using points to represent areas is a big limitation, but it is sufficient for a quick peek.
Anything to See?
An overwhelming majority of people had smart meters installed, > 90% in most places. So, BC Hydro’s brute force, no options, default installation plan was mostly successful
Places of higher than normal refusal tended to vote against the BC Liberals. I believe this had more to do with existing anti-BC-Lib tendencies influencing smart meter refusal rather than the other way around.
Urban centres like Victoria and Vancouver had relatively low rates of refusal. Is this because of higher apartment proportions, or because smart meter refusal was restricted to a small number of high information, highly motivated individuals whose number varied by location and whose numbers in places like Victoria were muted by larger populations?. Note that my home area of Victoria had the most (7300) rejected smart meters, even though the percentage is small. The ageing white (l)iberal enclave of Saltspring Island (Ganges), aka hippieville, Canada had by far the highest refusal percentage. So, is this smart meter refusal map mostly a hippie population distribution map?
The take home message for me was that the anti-smartmeter movement had little influence on the election, which was most likely won on the usual and mundane issues of the economy, trust and corruption.
The data from BC Hydro is categorized using their division of BC into distinct geographical billing areas. I used billing area names to geotag the information. The site http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/ has a feature where addresses can be uploaded in bulk via a text interface, and the site returns the place, and latitude longitude. I added province and country to the place names, and edited ambiguous names to make the search more effective.
I uploaded this table to arcgis to form one layer. Arcgis is a big and expensive GIS software, with a limited free online playpen where this map is displayed. I used graduated circles and natural breaks to represent the different levels of smart meter refusal. A big limitation to this approach is that the BC Hydro billing areas are just that, areas, not points on a map. However, the area boundaries are not available as a shape file, and geographical areas vary widely. So, the points correspond to the centre of the nearest big population area mentioned in the BC Hydro billing area description
I downloaded BC electoral district shape files from Paul Ramsey of Open Geo. These shape files are an improved version of those available from Elections BC, again, thanks to Chad Skelton for pointing me in this direction
Elections BC lists 2013 provincial election results information by party by district. However, there is no publicly downloadable mapped source for the election data results. I used the open source GIS desktop software QGIS to open the shape file and add the attribute of BC Liberal percentage to the shape file. I uploaded this shape file to arcgis and layered it with the smart meter refusal rate graduated circles to look for patterns.
Maps are fun to play with, and I know very very little about them, which is a great combination. Every minute I spent making this map was a learning experience. Comments and feedback, please. I think I will slowly incorporate mapping into my skill set. But I think I will use open source/free solutions in the future.
I have been