Maybe me nerves will ease now that we are nine up and five games to go. We have, however, been here before.
#21 – Memo To Cratchit
MEMORANDUM
From: Methuselah
To: Cratchit
Re: Stirrings of Tory Life At Last.
Date: 28 March 2006
+++++++++
Seeing as you have so little to do during these days of the great silence, perhaps you could contact that chum of yours in the office of the Finance Critic to find out why the hell nothing has been said yet about this article in the Globe yesterday. Notice this sort of wording:
Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty signalled Monday he will not eliminate the capital gains tax in his first budget. The Conservative government had campaigned on eliminating the tax for individuals on the sale of assets when proceeds are reinvested within six months. But Mr. Flaherty told reporters the government is still considering some election commitments, including when to eliminate the capital gains tax. He wouldn’t elaborate on which other promises are under consideration.
One wonders whether this sort of back stroking by the government before they have stood before Parliament for a single day is a little more important than the sorts of considerations I am hearing about on booking the proper hotel room in Montreal in December and who’s best placed to come second to Mr. Smarty Pants. Get on that thug pal of yours and get something going, would you!
And get a haircut!
Click Fraud Revisited
I just noticed this article on click fraud in Wired care of Boing and found a very odd thing – a moral argument for the rights of property holders:
By splitting revenue with the sites that host the ads, search engines have become, in effect, the Internet’s venture capitalists, funding the content that attracts people to the computer screen. Unlike the VCs who backed the boom-era Internet, search engines now provide revenue to thousands of wildly diverse sites at little up-front cost to them – PPC advertising is one of the few income sources available to bloggers, for instance. If rampant click fraud overwhelms the system, it will muffle the Internet’s fabulous cacophony of voices.
I don’t know how click fraud actually qualifies as fraud in the legal sense. I don’t know of a crime being committed or a contracual relationship being breached. The main example given in the story is one of extorsion, the threatening of Google with release of a autobot clickotron unless payment was made. Sadder still is the illustration of slogs – spam blogs – who exists only to generate traffic click throughs for a wee cheque:
Thousands of splogs exist, snarling the blogosphere – and the search engines that index it – in spam. Splogs are too profitable to be readily discouraged. According to RSS to Blog, a Brooklyn-based firm that sells automatic-blog software, sploggers can earn tens of thousands of dollars a month in PPC income, all without any human effort.
Imagine. Vacuous blogs created for alternative purpose. Whoda thunk it? The problem, of course, is the seduction of the technology generally and what it does to one’s thinking and one’s ethics. How much different is the new economic moral thinking compared to, say, actual legal regulations like copyright and the intellectual property of others. Is it because this clicky activity undermines the beloved as opposed to the actual rights of others? It is primarily the violation of the new moral crime against technological advance that is decried by Wired – we have a new plan that demands new thinking, new commerce and new crimes for the old thinkers…and we will tell you what the new thinking is after we get to it, thank you very much.
Isn’t the real problem the false valuation? Isn’t it incumbant on a firm presenting a new mode of advertising to prove its effectiveness in the marketplace as a mechanism for setting the price? Is it that the clicks are invalid or is it the mechanism which clicks which is. Isn’t the real question whether a click ad represents or ever represented value for money. Interesting to note that the one realistic alternative mentioned is micro-payments…about ten years after they were laughed away by the new think.
Take My Junk Mail…Please
Paul Lima had a vague feeling he wasn’t getting any mail. When his mother phoned wondering why he hadn’t cashed his birthday cheque, “the penny dropped,” the Toronto freelance writer says.
He called Canada Post, which said he had changed his address in person on Nov. 17.
“Not me,” he said.
I noticed how little the guy must have been getting in the mail. But how long was the person not noticing the daily junk mail and bills? There must be something that would have been noticed if two days went by. What do I get in the mail? Banks statements of sone sort or another. Bills. Magazines. The Child Tax Credit mailbox money. Yet – what a drag to have it happen.
The Two-IPA Challenge
I’ve wanted to try this comparison for a while. Sgt. Major’s IPA from Fitzroy Harbour in the Ottawa Valley is a unique beer in at least the eastern side Canada in that it attempts to take on the US style on its own chewy hoppy terms. Hop Devil IPA from Victory in Pennsylvania is one of the classic northeast US IPAs – balanced but big.
The two beers pour deep amber under fine off-white heads but the Hop Devil is darker while the head of the Sgt. Major holds its fine head with almost Guinness-like will power. In the mouth, the Canadian is hoppier by a long shot but the American presents raisin notes and is richer but by only a notch. Both rely on American hop strains to provide an unsweetened grapefruit twang thang. Both have a good grainy profile from a honest quality malt bill and both use fairly softish water compared to the amount of bittering – no sulfate cheating here. The Hop Devil uses a creamier yeast strain. The overall quality of the beers is extremely similar which is a real tribute to the small Ontario brewer.
I like them both and will have some confidence in picking up a six of Sgt. Major next time I am cranking in my mind about the lack of variety at the local beer suppliers.
Chat a la Friday
Once again it is the day before Saturday. It has been a good week around
here. No rocking out or anything but spring sprang and, really, that is half the
battle of the entire calendar:
- Update: It must be a requirement that you can prove that you have
been hit on the temple with a hammer recently to get to be a conservative
columnist. It has to be. Look at Andrew
Coyne’s shell game in his column today:Of course, part of the reason the provinces are so
loose with the coin is the benefactions of Uncle Ottawa, which Ontario and
Quebec in particular have proved adept at squeezing in all the right places. The
McGuinty government, which made the fictional “$23-billion gap” its war cry,
quietly pocketed over $13.2-billion in federal cash last year, a 34% increase
from just two years ago. Quebec, likewise, enjoyed an 8% increase in the last
fiscal year.It is not surprising, given the fine fiscal
understanding behind Tory-nomics, that he would not get the difference between
gross and net in his stunning analysis of Ontario’s position but equating Saudi
Albertia and Quebec as co-horts in economic solidity it dumbfounding. Compared
to this, David Frum comes across as
lucid. - Update: “…an eccentric old uncle who’s ignored…” Discuss.
- Update: pause a moment for the
250 year old tortoise that passed away in India. Born around 1755. - The Flea has posted a link to the best hoax
(unless the turtle story turns out to be one) that I have ever seen on the
internet. I am a huge sucker and the use of a gesticulating professor was a
brilliant diversion. - I was thinking about the bleating cry of the Boing Boing the other day when I read yet
another rant about how the law of ownership should be amended because people
have figured out a better way to steal…when it occurred to me that I have
never seen a fair trade argument in relation to Digital Rights Management. How
is it that we are so concerned about Juan Valdez and rightly seek out better
coffee and other goods which are sold with fewer dollars going to the middle man
and more to Juan but we do not use the same model for Juanita, his guitar
playing cousin? Maybe because we would steal all Juan’s coffee if we could? - I gleefully watched LSU
beat Duke last night but realized quickly that no one in the pool
saw the
loss coming so no one gets the big points on question #1. I hearby declare
after 5837 have declared it before me that Glen “Big Baby” Davis is the new
Shaq. I remember the, what, 1989 LSU March Madness and the side of beef that did
ballet called Shaquille O’Neal. It was deja vu all over again. - Was Stevie always this chubby
or has someone done this
to him?