So the joke around the office is, with 3 back-to-back Conservative administrations in Canada, are Republicans threatening to move to Canada if Obama wins?

The LA Times has an exhaustive list of election night coverage by the television networks:

Where to tune in on election night

For example,

ABC: The trio of Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos kick off coverage at 4 p.m., followed by a special edition of “Nightline” at 11:35 p.m.

CBS: Anchor Katie Couric, along with Bob Schieffer and Jeff Greenfield, report on the results beginning at 4 p.m., followed by a live webcast on CBSNews.com at 11 p.m.

My favourite:

Current: Beginning at 4 p.m., the network will deliver a real-time stream of election updates, Digg stories and Twitter posts, along with live music sets by DJ Diplo.

Anchor Diplo, please adjust your tie.

In Seed Magazine’s endorsement of Barack Obama, they make this rather startling claim:

“Far more important is this: Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed. Science offers a methodology and philosophy rooted in evidence, kept in check by persistent inquiry, and bounded by the constraints of a self-critical and rigorous method. Science is a lens through which we can and should visualize and solve complex problems, organize government and multilateral bodies, establish international alliances, inspire national pride, restore positive feelings about America around the globe, embolden democracy, and ultimately, lead the world. More than anything, what this lens offers the next administration is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes its way, no matter how complex or unanticipated.”

I suppose the “methodology and philosophy” of science (whatever that may be) may serve as a productive metaphor for some aspects of governance. In particular, routine and rigorous assessment of the outcomes of policies and subsequent adjustments of those policies seems like a good idea that roughly corresponds with “the scientific method” of doing things. There is also a tradition of adhering to the observable truth, without regard to personal or institutional consequences, which is expressed to a remarkable, albeit incomplete degree in scientific institutions. Politics could hugely benefit from adopting such a valuation of truth.

But governance is about so much more than facts. It’s about values. It’s all mixed up with equity, and justice, and consent, and consensus, and the lack of consensus, and figuring out just what the hell our goals for our society are anyway. I’m not sure exactly what “science” is, but I’m pretty certain it is not a way of governing human communities. I think it’s strange that the Seed editors would even make such a claim. Robert McNamara for president!

We don’t have anything like this in Canada.

Greenspan Concedes to `Flaw’ in His Market Ideology — Bloomberg (2nd Term)

‘”If we are right 60 percent of the time in forecasting, we are doing exceptionally well; that means we are wrong 40 percent of the time,” Greenspan said. “Forecasting never gets to the point where it is 100 percent accurate.”‘

Yes, that follows. And when the consequences of bad outcomes are catastrophic and prediction of good outcomes can’t be certain, you have to have policies which are robust to failure. What Greenspan seems to have been suggesting, and what he still seems to be defending, is that when prediction cannot be 100%, it is acceptable or even inevitable to forge ahead as if the outcome was sure to be uniformly positive.

‘Today, the former Fed chairman asked: “What went wrong with global economic policies that had worked so effectively for nearly four decades?”

Greenspan reiterated his “shocked disbelief” that financial companies failed to execute sufficient “surveillance” on their trading counterparties to prevent surging losses.’

So how many catastrophic market failures do we have to have before we get past shocked disbelief when there’s another? Sure, each one is different in specific character than the last, but the insistence that this time we’ve got it all figured out is practically childish when repeated ad infinitum. Marketeers seem capable of convincing themselves that, because they are personally familiar with the mechanisms at play at the level of individuals, they can therefore know what behaviour will emerge at the level of the system. It’s not that neoliberal market theorists don’t believe in emergence, by contrast they are devoted to the elegant efficiencies that they see when markets aggregate information and action. They just don’t seem to want to believe that complex systems (including the ultra-complex systems Wall St. financiers are capable of cooking up) are capable of negative outcomes too.

It comes back to John Kenneth Galbraith’s position that market collapses don’t happen because of unpredictable shocks from somewhere outside of the lines that economists draw around “the economy”, they happen because of the most fundamental rules of capitalist economies. And they will again, particularly if we don’t exercise cautious oversight.

update: See also this interesting and convincing chunk of quotes from the same testimony:

Greenspan: Bad data hurt Wall Street computer models — NYT

‘Business decisions by financial services firms were based on “the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts, supported by major advances in computer and communications technology,” Greenspan told the committee. “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades a period of euphoria.”

He added that if the risk models also had been built to include “historic periods of stress, capital requirements would have been much higher and the financial world would be in far better shape today, in my judgment.”‘

We live and learn. Especially about using models to make serious decisions.

Maude Barlow named 1st UN water adviser — CBC

Seriously? Will she have some kind of authority to go with that responsibility? I guess “adviser” doesn’t really suggest that she will. Can’t be a bad thing, regardless.

It’s too late for hughstimson.org to endorse Barack Obama in the Estados Unidos presidential election. I picked my candidate out a while ago, and I’m sticking to him.

I am however grudgingly backing Barack Obama as the “candidate most likely to be far better than the other candidate”, now that Kucinich appears an unlikely contender. So vote Obama, if you can. He did vote against the war when that meant something, and he does have a reasonableness which seems to escape federal politics generally.

Back when I was settling on Dennis as my true champion in the American arena, Esquire magazine of all magazines did a nice job of cementing my decision. Here’s Esquire again, on why you should probably vote Obama, but probably not be too giddy about it:

Esquire Endorses Barack Obama for President

By contrast, I’m downright excited to be voting in the Canadian election for Dick Hibma of the Green Party in the Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound riding. I don’t know Dick, and I gather his chances aren’t especially good for beating the incumbent Conservative. But I gather he’s the best chance there is. And I’m told the Conservative candidate is in grand need of being beaten. The funny thing is, environment plays well in the rural counties. If you’re a farmer (and if you’re from Bruce-Grey, you probably are), you like that Lary Miller of the Conservatives is also a farmer. But you’re also concerned about development on the escarpment, about corporatization of family farms, about climate uncertainty, about regional wind power development, about the stability of fuel prices, about the fuelization of feed grains, and so on. And so apparently you might just vote Green because of it. When I mentioned to my father, some time back, that he should consider setting up for a run as the Green B-G-O candidate, he allowed that the Greens already had a strong candidate in the riding. So that’s another strong endorsement there.

All this assumes that my absentee ballot is going to show up in the mail soon. I sent in my application with weeks to go. It will come, right?

I could also have reasonably chosen to vote in Victoria BC, my other Canadian home. But I hear Denise Savoie of the NDP has become firmly established there. I hafta say, last time around it was a pleasure to vote for someone I knew and liked, and see her win. I’m glad she’s going to win again.

And with that, I am officially saturated on electoral politics. Let it all be over as soon as possible.

Newsweek has an article, The Fall of America, Inc., running down the successes, failures and modern challenges of the last century of these United States. Big deal, except this is by Francis “The End of History” Fukuyama hisself. If he’s concerned, I’m concerned.

“Reaganism (or, in its British form, Thatcherism) was right for its time. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, governments all over the world had only grown bigger and bigger. By the 1970s large welfare states and economies choked by red tape were proving highly dysfunctional. Back then, telephones were expensive and hard to get, air travel was a luxury of the rich, and most people put their savings in bank accounts paying low, regulated rates of interest.
….
Like all transformative movements, the Reagan revolution lost its way because for many followers it became an unimpeachable ideology, not a pragmatic response to the excesses of the welfare state. Two concepts were sacrosanct: first, that tax cuts would be self-financing, and second, that financial markets could be self-regulating.”

If the goal of the bail-out is to keep the lending system going so that businesses outside the financial sector can maintain their basic operations, then fine, let’s do it. I’m surprised to learn just how much modern small and medium sized businesses depend on short-term loans for basic daily operations, but apparently they do. I’m surprised to learn how quickly the crumbling of a few wall-street financial companies has affected loan availability for regional businesses from regional banks, but apparently it has. And if so I suppose if those loans dry up it’s gonna hurt us all.

If that’s the goal of the bail-out, or at least once outcome of it, fine.

And if another outcome is giving mortgage owners a chance to renegotiate their debt rather than it all going to default on them, then fine, let’s have a bail out. If.

But as I fuzzily understand, the machinations of the bail out plan involve all kinds of reverse-auctioning of debt packages and other obscure financial transactions which are presumably going to take days and weeks and months to fall into place. So it’s not going to solve problems on the scale of this week.

So why the heck are we rushing into this thing like it’s a burning house and Obama and McCain and Paulson and Pelosi and Bush and the rest of them are the ones with buckets of water? It’s hundreds of billions of dollars being spent, and presumably a decadal-scale restructuring of the finance system, and it’s not going to make anything different in the instant term. So why can’t we take until, say, next Tuesday to talk the damn thing through? Surely to God no one has even had time to read the whole thing through.

Sure we need to restore confidence in the system by proving that the government is going to step up to the plate and take big action. But that’s obviously going to happen now, anyone who needed reassurance of that before they could engage confidently in their business can just go ahead and do so. Really, I said it was okay.

Of course, if the bail-out is to save specific financial-sector specific businesses which needed immediate interventions…

But we wouldn’t spend money to save those house-wreckers now would we? Would we?

After getting irritated at humankind’s inability to accept that some things are genuinely uncertain, I open my podcasting device and hey presto:

Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times — A World Of Possibilities, May 6th

It opens with Buzz Holling (who NRE 580 alumnus will remember for panarchy theory) on adaptation, uncertainy, adeterminism, non-equilibrium, and such like in the general world. Then it moves onto Brian Walker talking about much of the same in ecosystem management, plus control fetishism. Then it moves on from there. Recorded at a Stockhlom conference on applying biology-based resilience theory to social systems. The idea of which is now creeping me out. Except that maybe, just maybe, this is a group of people that can be trusted to think rationally across disciplines. Maybe. Anyhow, it’s good listening.

Brian Walker’s talk reminded me of a lecture on conservation management from my undergrad, wherein Thom Nudds announced that if you manage to get an ecosystem to not cycle you’ve flatlined it, so congratulations on that.

I have nothing to say about the financial crisis, because I discover that as a heavy news reader who has scraped through classes on law, economics and complex systems, and even read some Galbraith on a bus once, I don’t have even first principles to judge what has just happened in the US financial system. The subject–the impenetrable interplay of financial “instruments”–is so inscrutable that any comprehensible narrative one tries to tease out of it by watching the shadows it casts on the wall seems to have more to do with what goes on in one’s own head than what goes on in the stock markets or boardrooms or policy lairs of the world. I just have no idea about where it came from, or what it means, or what should be done, or where it will go. All I’ve learned is that the people who presumably do have the expertise to deal with this, possibly don’t.

But everyone is telling one story or another about it all the same. And they usually boil down to public versus private, government versus market. Here’s a somehow rather heartening thought from commenter HH at Crooked Timber:

The left-right polarization over and private enterprise is overshadowed by the larger conflict between truth and lies. Both free market and planned economic systems can function with reasonable efficiency when operated with competence and integrity. Neither can function when overrun by thieves and liars.

America’s moon landing program and nuclear submarine projects were masterpieces of centrally planned, government sponsored endeavors. France’s nationally controlled nuclear power program achieved great success, while America’s privately managed nuclear power efforts stumbled. It is the animating vigor and functional integrity of a program that is the best predictor of success, not its ideological grounding.

To which I think I would add that we get a somewhat better chance at choosing thoughtful criteria for what ’success’ means for public enterprises than for private.

Here’s an old-hand financial technician interviewed by Reason magazine people:

(Just incidentally, I’m tickled to note that the Reason blog linked to this little old website a few days back).

I don’t understand how he gets from some of his premises to some of his conclusions. But his central premise feels about right: nobody knows how to value these derivatives, which seem to have absorbed so much of the nations wealth and now may or may not even particularly exist as real entities in the real universe. The old bosses didn’t know how to value them, and the new bosses won’t either, once they’ve sunk so much more of the country’s treasure into getting a chance to try.

But we won’t admit to ourselves that we’re dealing with an uncertainty, will we? Instead we’ll talk ourselves into believing one thing or the other, and forge ahead on that basis.

A separate but related question: how does a country that can’t afford equitable education or health care keep finding hundreds of billions of dollars lying around when there’s a country to be invaded or a bank to be bought out? Where does all this money come from? And why wasn’t it there before?

Obama opposes Bush endangered species proposal — AP

“Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne defended the changes in a call with reporters Monday, calling them narrow modifications to make the law more clear and efficient.

In recent years, both federal agencies and developers have complained that the reviews, which can result in changes to projects that better protect species, have delayed work and increased costs.

The proposed regulations, which will be published Thursday in the Federal Register, included one significant change from the earlier draft: The public comment period was cut in half, from 60 to 30 days.

“In this case, it was determined that we need to move forward in a timely fashion,” said Interior Department spokeswoman Tina Kreisher.”

“In this case, it was determined that we need to move forward in a timely fashion”: worst sentence ever.

‘Kenneth L. Wainstein, the White House adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism, recently visited Denver and St. Paul, a trip that reflected the administration’s interest in the conventions. “In the post-9/11 world, you have to prepare and plan for all contingencies,” Mr. Wainstein said. “That means preparing for everything from a minor disruption and an unruly individual to a broader terrorist event. We need to plan for everything no matter what the threat level is on any particular day.”’

Denver Police Brace for Convention — NYT

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was signed into existence 50 years ago today. The Economist has a good, reasonably breif, article about the intentions and directions of the agency. Being the Economist, it’s partially speculation about potential private-industry virtues of “space exploration”. But the article is more about the division between the dreams of the manned and unmanned branches of the agency. It also mentions the earth-observing program, which I think is a third NASA branch unto itself. The article suggests the unmanned probe makers may tolerate the manned exploration romantics just as cover and funding-bait. And possibly vice a versa. Maybe the earth-observers can likewise use both the manned and the unmanned missions as an infrastructure to exploit. Either dream is closer to the original mandate of the massive NASA bureaucracy than building satellites to measure the environment, which could be a hard sell on it’s own. Or maybe, nowadays, astronauts and probes both just draw away money and steam it off into space.

Many happy returns? — The Economist

Also see A Rocket to Nowhere, from a few years back.

The coverage coming out of the first military tribunal at Guantanamo is freakish and disturbing.

The agency name that dare not be spoken — LA Times

“To have an impressive backdrop for the government’s daily spin on the tribunal proceedings, a Pentagon engineering unit built and furnished a press briefing room inside the abandoned hangar that houses journalists covering the Hamdan trial.

At a cost of nearly $50,000, the news-conference room at Camp Justice — as the Expeditionary Legal Complex is known — has one serious problem: You can’t hear a thing when the giant air conditioner is turned on, and you can’t breathe when it isn’t.

The roaring AC is turned off just seconds before the Pentagon public affairs officers approach the podium in front of the Stars and Stripes and the five flags of the uniformed services.”

The Orwell jokes just aren’t funny any more. I’m depressed. Of course there’s plenty of coverage which reports incidental facts, stripped of context. Maybe I should just read that.

This article from the NYT on Obama’s foreign policy infrastructure has some interesting tidbits about how foreign policy theory from academics and institutes gets translated into stated policy.

A Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy

“Out in the netherworld of the 300, advisers often say they are unclear about what happens to all the policy paragraphs they churn out on request. “It’s all mysterious what we send him and what gets to him,” said Michael A. McFaul, a Russia scholar at Stanford University who leads the Russia and Eurasia team for the Obama campaign.

Other team leaders include Ivo H. Daalder, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has organized his 40-member nuclear nonproliferation team into eight working groups, and Philip H. Gordon, another scholar at the institution, who is in charge of Mr. Obama’s Europe team.”

(note that registration and full demogrpahic disclosure is required by the NYT before you can look at their website.)

Stephen Kohn is the executive director of the National Whistleblower Center. A week ago on the Worldview radio show, he deployed the word “guantanamization” into the english language. You can hear him do it here.

The Air Force Association, a “a private organization that acts as surrogate and spokesman for the service” (nyt). Weeeeird.

Since when did Chinese paramilitary officers deploy to the US? (last sentence of the article)

Here’s something you won’t often see here on the hughstimson.org\blog: an earnest link to a point in defense of capitalism. It’s a good point. You can read further down the comment thread for the rebuttals, which are inevitably good points. But I enjoyed the pleasant sensation of feeling briefly coaxed away from my normal, boring, predictable point of view.

One day, perhaps in the future, the US may elect some people into the government. In the meantime, I for one welcome our transhuman overlords.

I’m currently listening to Brian Wynn in the How to Think About Science series. He tells a story reminiscent of the physicists wagering the apocalypticness of the first atomic bomb explosion. Wikipedia provides a slightly drier, but more complete recounting of the decision to use water to put out the reactor fire at the Windscale Pile 1, Oct 11 1957.

I’m also reminded of this photo I took at the Los Alamos science history museum a few years ago.

When I dropped into ABC last night, the mood at the Day 1 post-party was good (not this good, I guess that happened after). They had already received word that negotiations–which the administrations has traditionally refused to even engage in during work action–were going remarkably well. I knew from my time on campus that the walkout had been a strong event. This morning I woke up to find that unlike Monday’s session, the administration hadn’t gone home before the party was over. In fact, they sat with us until we reached a tentative deal that mooted a second day’s walkout. Which I feel a little cheated about, because today was the day I was going to spend on the picket line.

Frankly, we won.

Later this week we’ll have a full vote on ratifying the contract, but I’m guessing that’s a formality. I would like to write a real post about my experience of the negotiations and the job action, and maybe I’ll have a little more time to do such things now that the union action is settling down. But it feels good to know we did something for those who will come after. And to those folks who will labour under this contract I say: you’re welcome, and remember us when you sit down at the table to set the working conditions for the next lot.

I’ve arrived during the after-session. Negotiation has ceased and we’re talking amongst ourselves. I’m only briefly in the room, but what I’m hearing is:

The administration is starting to get frustrated, because they are expecting us to back off and we aren’t and aren’t and aren’t.

Sounds to me like we’re heading towards a walkout.

–

Ah yes, it’s announced that the Stewards Council has voted to propose a March 25th/26th walk out. So depending what happens from here, next mass meeting will include a vote on whether that will happen or not.

Contracts are for 3 years. During the last two negotiations, there have been 1 day work stoppages which have been successful in moving the administration. So this would be a small escalation. Note that other unions (particularly construction) will likely respect any picket lines. This wouldn’t be a strike, which is an indefinite action which only ceases when a settlement is reached on contract negotiation, but rather a fixed-length demonstration of student willingness.

–

Before that, there is a planned visibility action on Monday for the diag. Specifics TBA.

–

And we’re done.

Earlier sessions: 1, 2.

Good lord, Tre Arrow is finally going to court.

Tre Arrow Pleads Not Guilty, Trial Set for May — Willamette Week

Barack Obama and John McCain seem to locked into a sort of awkward game-theory romance on taking public funds for their (presumptive) presidential campaigns.

McCain: Obama Should Take Public Funding

Decades of advertising-driven political campaigns have created an arms-race scenario that long ago blew past logical extremes and is now tottering around in the illogical extremes of 100s of millions of dollars of candidate’s money being spent each time there’s a US presidential race. No one who unilaterally scales back their campaign financing expects to win — a seperate co-evolutionary process between media and the public have resulted in newspapers, TV and radio which are devoid of the candidate’s positions, just their polls and horse-race commentary. Consequently expensive paid advertising, terrible medium that it may be for communicating political ideas, is the main channel candidates have to distribute their message to people who aren’t already converts.

There is a bi-lateral disarmarment option. Nowadays, a candidate can opt to take public funding for their campaign. It’s free money, from the taxpayers (I think), but the disadvantage is it isn’t nearly as much as a US presidential candidate can potentially raise through private donations. Not nearly enough, in other words, to beat a privately funded opponent. And if they take the public funds, they can’t use their private funds to campaign on.

On the other hand, private funds come with a price. The bulk of private donations come from corporations and other rich actors, who expect loyalty for their money. Whether that channels through lobbyists or not, the sensible name for this interaction is “bribery” and “corruption”. We’ve gotten so used to it that we don’t see it that way, but whatever, it is. US politicians these days are self-selected to be comfortable with the bribery/corruption way of doing things, but both McCain and Obama have made noise about campaign finance reform and getting out of the lobbyist pocket. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that when somebody looked into it, they were each the candidate with the fewest former lobbyists in their top campaign staff, for their respective parties.

So it’s just about a prisoner’s dilemma. The best possible option, in terms of total payoff, is for both of them to go for the public funds. And both of them have speculated charmingly about it in public, mostly back before they thought they had a clear shot at being their party’s nominee. But the best option for either one of them is to stick to private funds and have the other guy go public. Then the one who stays private can advertise their way into the whitehouse and lounge around drinking magnums of Jefferson’s champagne long into the night while speculating languidly about how to use their enormous new power to make sure they future is lobbyist free. But according to Nash’s beautiful mind, they’re going to end up both having to take the private funds, working hard to gather them up, being owned by their donors, and fighting a likewise privately-funded opponent. Because in the prisoner’s dilemma, you have to assume that the other guy is going to bail on you.

Except you don’t of course, it just usually ends up that way. So how can these two avoid that fate? It seems like they’re trying to collude together, in public, without committing to anything, by way of campaign speech soundbites and public news releases. Somebody help these guys out. We need a binding, enforceable mechanism where one can say “I promise that if the other guy promises to take public funds, I will take public funds”, and then they can use that as a holier-than-thou until the other guy makes the same commitment, but if the other guy doesn’t, no skin off nobody’s back. And hey, just maybe the other guy will make that commitment, and we’ll have the first publicly funded US presidential race, and we can write another chapter in the story of the US’s inexorable move to democracy.

update: I remembered that wrong. McCain actually had the most lobbyists working for his campaign. Out of everybody. He is indeed big on campaign finance reform, but it seems to be an open question whether his ideas of reform are positive or just bad.

Strange to see the Albertan oil boom showing up on Kottke.org as a novel topic. If this is news to people who haven’t been personally associated with the oil patch, then it’s far past time this news gets out. This should be and needs to be an major regional national and international issue.

Note that the Edward Burtynsky photographs seem to be of the smaller of the two major oil sands projects.

Well here we are in the Koessler Room of the Michigan League. Violet-tinted windows let the late-afternoon, late-winter light into the wood paneled room. There’s a big table across the front of the room. On the far side of the table are a number of well-kempt academic types. On our side are a range of hastily cleaned-up, slightly underfed (vegans? smokers?) studenty looking types.

The rest of the room has chairs, some empty, some occupied with less-well-kempt slightly underfed studenty looking types. The predominant sound is the clicking of laptop keys. The studenty types at the table occasionally ask a question, slowly and carefully. The man in the center of the academic types answers slowly and carefully. There are pauses in between the questions and the answers and the questions.

As each new section of the contract comes up, paper print-outs are passed out throughout the crowd. These copies show the contract proposal as submitted by the union, with the administration’s response superimposed in the form of MS Word-style revision mark-up. That mark-up is mostly in the form of large-scale deletions.

It’s not a particularly exciting event to live-blog. Most of the substantive issues are dealt with very quietly and in small-scale language.

Here’s the gist as I see it:

Your request of pay raises in keeping with cost-of-living increase: No.

Your request for same-sex benefits: meh.

Your request for pay during required training events: No.

Your request for partial tuition waivers for small-fractional GSIs: No.

Your request for tuition waivers for quarter+ fraction GSIs: No.

The key words here are: “current contract language”. As in the old one. AT least we’re not losing ground I guess.

The justification is: we can’t deal with that proposal until we know what the financial impact of those other proposals is. Repeat as necessary.

–

Best moment so far: one of our guys asks “of the substantive proposals we’ve put forward, can you think of a single one which you not turning down?” Followed by 20 seconds or so of silence. Then an “okay, moving along…”.

–

Us: “Given that almost everything you’ve given back to us is just “orginial contract language”, I’m a little surprised that it took you until today to give it to us…”

–

Also good (but again, the good stuff mostly comes from people getting frustrated and saying stuff which probably isn’t particularly productive):

Us: “You’ve framed this as a series of economic “repercussions”, which sounds really bad, we’ve framed it as an investment in people who will bring more money to the school. Do you reject that philosophy?”

Them: “Well, can you ask a yes or no question?”

Us: “It was.”

–

Them: “With respect to your proposal for professional leave, the language you’ve proposed leaves it open to being as much as a term..”

Us: “Uh, I think you mean pregnancy leave…”

Them: “Oh right sorry.”

Us: “Yeah ‘I have to go to a conference, it lasts 4 months”.

Them: “Well, actually, that could happen under the language you’ve proposed for professional leave too”.

Oh snap.

–

Us: “yes, so you’ve struck the word (inaudible), because it’s passive and unclear I suppose…”

Other us: “…ask an english major…”

Them: “we’ll check that with our english majors…”

–

And so on. Scintillating material. Now we’re negotiating the number of copies of the contract to be printed. Vigorously.

I guess this has to do with September 11th 2001 in some way. The state of Michigan has decided in it’s excellent wisdom that if you want get a driver’s license you have to provide proof of citizenship or permanent residency. Since the US defines anyone without a green card as “non-resident”, regardless of whether you live here or not, that means that most internationals won’t be able to get licenses.

I’ve lived here over a year, and in the US for almost 4. My tax money pays for US foreign wars, as well as the State of Michigan’s doings. I’ve formally pledged myself to the Constitutions of the USA and the State of Michigan. But I can’t get a license.

Does this mean they’re going to relax the expectation that you get a state license to replace your international one, or does it just mean we’re not allowed on the roads?

It looks like Vantreight Farm’s proposal to develop a piece of their land has been shot down:

Council rejects Vantreight proposal — Times Colonist

The proposal for about 250 homes on a 13-hectare chunk of land that Vantreight said is rocky and unfarmable has caused much division in the largely rural community. Although the majority of people who spoke at a packed public meeting Monday were in favour, municipal staff recommended against it.
….
Vantreight proposed a “green development” on the property at 8410 Wallace Dr., using a system that recovers organic waste, water and heat from the residential development to provide energy and organic fertilizer for the farm.

But the proposal is contrary to the Official Community Plan, the document that outlines the long-term vision and goals for the municipality. It would also require changes to a regional plan on where growth is to happen, and isn’t on municipal sewer or water system, municipal staff said in a report to council. The site also has Garry oaks and woodland, none of which appeared to be saved with Vantreight’s plan.

Staff said a smaller development might be appropriate, and some councillors suggested Vantreight come back with that, rather than a proposal so clearly beyond what the community plan calls for.

Nuff respek to the Central Saanich council for sticking by their community plan I suppose, those things are often the last line of defense against heavy development, but I have to admit, I’m awfully torn on this one. Somebody commented in my very first daffodil post asking how to get work at the farm. I’d hate to think it’s not going to be an option in a year or two. And were they really going to recycle their own waste? Damn, that’s really far out on the edge of green-ness. If they could be held to that, they’d be setting a precedent for other developers.

“This proposal, whatever you may think of it, is about saving one of the last farms of this size in Central Saanich,” Warner said. “This is our one last chance for one farm of this size.”

Farmland on the Saanich Peninsula is so expensive that farmers can’t make a living off growing crops alone. “Not any legal crop we’re allowed to grow, anyway,” Warner said.

“This is land that could well be of use to us 100 years from now. It has the ability to produce food for this region that we may not get again. Think about that.”