Coppertop

Here's the final sentence of an article about the recent Google failure:

I can only hope that Google, Amazon, and others notice what a difference it can make to treat their valued customers like valued customers -- and, little by little, move toward becoming even more open and honest with us all in the future.

One minor nit - we are not Google's customers. We are Google's product - its customers are advertisers (They pay Google's bills, we don't).

The Coalition

So, in case you've been living under a rock for the last week, Canada's three opposition parties have signed a deal to overthrow the Harper Conservative government. They propose a governing coalition of the Liberals and NDP, with the Liberal leader (currently Stephane Dion) as the Prime Minister. Prime Minister Harper, in response to this proposal, got the Governor General to suspend Parliament until January. Now, while I strongly dislike Harper's government style, and think people underestimate Mr. Dion, I'm not quite sold on the coalition idea. Their entire point is that the Tories aren't doing enough, quickly enough on the economic crisis. However, their own plans have been somewhat slow coming out (announce downthrow of government first, release plans later), and switching governments mid-Parliament would certainly slow down anything getting done. Also, as one of my good friends once said, "you can trust Stephen Harper to do exactly what will get him the most votes" - crashing the economy would get him chased out with a stick next federal election. He's also trained as an economist, and from what I hear did fairly well at it. So, while I don't really like him, and think the opposition parties ran on significantly better platforms last election, I won't complain if Stephen Harper holds on to government, as long as he gets some good things done - on the flip side, if the coalition gets into power, and then makes a hash of things, I may just vote Conservative next election.

10 000

Well, I haven't posted for a while (can't believe I completely missed the federal election ... I probably should say something about the "coalition" in another post), but I realized something this week I thought I should say: I could live quite comfortably on $10 000 a year. I was looking at how much I've spent over the last four months, and, discounting tuition, it was only about $2 500. This isn't trying to be holier-than-thou, it just made me think about how much we demand as "basic necessities " as a society. For one person, in the size of city I live in, the poverty line is about $17 000. Sure, I don't own a car (which would probably eat up another few thousand dollars a year)), but in the city I live in, I don't have to - public transit (which is very good here) and my own two feet serve me well enough (Here's a link to a guy's blog about why cars are largely unnecessary - he's full of vitriol, absolutely spitting acid, but he makes some decent points nonetheless, I think). My furniture may be second (or third) hand used, but it gives me a comfortable place to sit, and somewhere to store my stuff. I have money for real food with real meat and vegetables, and even entertainment (cable TV, the high-speed internet connection I am typing this on now, the occasional movie, dinner out, etc.). Sure, people usually want a higher quality of living - bigger, nicer places to live, and newer, better stuff - when they get out of university, but I wonder a bit why - do I really need that? We hear newscasters talking about the present economic crisis until they're blue in the face, and I know a lot of people are in real pain from it - lost jobs and bankruptcies - but we really brought it on ourselves as a society. We've let capitalism and materialism run out of control, and forgotten the value of hard work, savings, and making things to last (not saying I haven't done this too, by the way). I just hope it doesn't take another Great Depression to make us all remember.

Messages from the future

You know, if I could get a message from myself, twenty years in the future, and it told me that I never owned a car - I'd believe it, I think. (Providing the message from my future self could authenticate its sender reliably - I strongly doubt the feasibility of time travel) - But about the car - I wouldn't mind owning a car, I have my license, I like driving, and I fully expect to own one at some future date - but I wouldn't be surprised if I never owned one. Back home, I could always borrow my parents - living in a university town, foot and public transit suffice to get me around - a car just isn't worth the expenditure. I can see that not changing though - gas is only getting more expensive - unless a viable alternative to petroleum-fueled internal combustion engines emerges, owning a personal automobile will soon become infeasibly expensive. Its going to make changes - one of which will be the fall of the small automobile - better dust off your bicycle helmets.

Maybe I will be able to stay near home after graduation ...

New figures say New Brunswick is in the middle of an unprecedented job boom.

A Statistics Canada report released Friday shows the province led the country in job creation in the first half of 2007, and its current unemployment rate is the lowest ever recorded there.

Good news. Encouraging. Like to hear more of it.

An interesting idea

Here's an idea I like - some European automakers are suggesting an emissions credit system for automakers. So a high emitter, say Ferrari, would have to buy credits from a low emitter, say Honda, to pay for the higher emissions of its cars. This would make higher emitting cars more expensive, and, what they didn't mention in the IHT article I heard about it in, would slightly subsidize more practical transportation. I like the idea - seems good, though the fact that emissions credits for nations didn't seem like such a good idea.

Please tell me this is a typo ....

Please tell me this piece of an article about flash memory has a typo:

"If you look at the market, prices have dropped about 50 percent," said Niebel. "You could get an 8GB [memory chip] for $10 in December. Now you're getting it for $5.

I personally think that they left a zero off each of the dollar amounts - that would put the wholesale memory prices at a more reasonable level, considering the prices of flash-based products. If that's not a typo ... wow are we all getting ripped off.

The Premier is giving me free money!

Well, it appears Shawn Graham's Liberals are following through on their election promises, and giving all New Brunswick students attending university full-time at a New Brunswick public university free money. $2,000 to be precise. I'm happy ...

I thought competition was supposed to help the consumer

Well, apparently Microsoft has signed a deal with Universal Studios to pay them a royalty on sales of its new Zune music player. This is in supposed compensation for the pirated content that is often loaded on mp3 players. This is NOT good for consumers - it gives all the studios licence to charge all the music players and services more money - ultimately costing consumers more money ... strangely, the Apple monopoly on internet music services and music players has been holding prices down for the consumer, because if content providers want market access, they have to go through Apple and play by their rules ... Microsoft's Zune ploy is an interesting development, and it'll be interesting to see where this goes ...

Ridiculous Money-Grubbing Trademark Lawsuit of the Day

The Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corporation, who own the domain www.utube.com, are suing YouTube for inadvertently directing extra internet traffic their way, so much that their servers crash. This is completely ridiculous, as they would have sued earlier if YouTube was really making a difference - I heard about this on the Google Watch blog, and the third commenter, Russ, seems to have the most reasonable view on the matter.

Microsoft Playing Hardball with the EU

Ahh ... Microsoft and its legal troubles - its doing a monopolistic thing now, and getting back at the European Union for its pesky anti-trust regulations by threatening a late European release date for its upcoming Windows Vista operating system. This late release date is, of course, to make sure that their operating system doesn't include any features that would constitute an uncompetitive use of their OS monopoly. Of course, this won't help the situation any - its annoying enough to make the government mad, but not enough of a lever to change the situation. I see yet more sanctions coming.

Microsoft Market Grab

In other Microsoft news, they are selling their Xbox 360 console at a deeply discounted rate in Japan, in an attempt to increase their market share in the country, where their first Xbox was trounced by the rival SonyPlayStation 2 and Nintendo Gamecube systems. I wonder how much per system they're losing on these discounts?

University Funding

I was reading an article how Shawn Graham, leader of the provincial Liberals, is promising a $2,000 grant to first-year undergraduate university students, starting this month!!! I hope they win and do that - no government, at any level, does all that much for university students, so it would be a welcome change. We need it, given that tuition rates are still outpacing inflation - they rose 5.8% this year in New Brunswick, to an average of $5,328 a year for undergraduates - both those numbers, by the way, are the second-highest of all the provinces. (That article is worth reading, and has quite a few interesting statistics)

Random fact of the day - 08.18.06

I was reading this article online and found this interesting fact at the end. Apparently Canada is the third-largest producer of diamonds in the world (by value). Who would have thought? I figured diamonds all came from Africa. You learn something new every day.