A blogger comments on the recent NDP leadership debate in TO. He highlights this point from Cullen: “For the cost of three new fighter jets, could lift every senior out of poverty,” and adds, “BS meter spike?”
Actually, Cullen’s estimate might not be so far off the mark. A billion dollars is a lot of spare change. Here are my back of the envelope calculations: Continue reading
I recently finished up a couple of papers on aggregate poverty outcomes among the 10 Canadian provinces. The work consisted of estimating poverty intensity (Sen-Shorrocks-Thon poverty measure) for each of the Canadian provinces, for each year between 1990 and 2008, and summarizing any patterns that jumped out.
A lot of ink has been spilled settling on where and when to use relative vs absolute thresholds, how relative thresholds should be calculated, and how measures should be estimated. I take these issues as settled (and believe me, they more or less are). I choose instead to explore what impact basing our relative thresholds over national or provincial populations would have on our substantive poverty findings. Continue reading
A fun article about parking in LA and an obscure academic discipline “caught between urban planning and traffic engineering”: parking theory…
Urban planners, says [Donald] Shoup, have no theory, use no hard data, when choosing parking requirements; they consult the manuals to decide. Every business imaginable is found within: Funeral parlors? A basic formula is eight parking spaces plus one for each hearse. Convents? One-tenth of a space per nun is fine. Adult bookstores? One space for every prospective patron plus one for the cashier holding the longest shift (no mention of the flasher in the alley). Public swimming pools? One space for every 2,500 gallons of water on the premises, chlorine included.
The figures are as precise as their origins are incomprehensible.
Read the rest. Via boingboing.net.
Motivated by a couple of recent headline grabbing labour disputes, previous CAW labour negotiator and current NDP leadership candidate, Peggy Nash, has started calling for a number of updates to be made to the Investment Canada Act.
I am especially fond of the amendment that would require, “public hearings that allow for community input into decisions on both the assessment of “net benefit” and conditions to apply to the investment.” In each of these disputes, it doesn’t matter whether the companies or the workers are in the right, what matters is that communities should have been invited to the table when decisions that were bound to affect them were made.
An open letter from the president of the Canadian Labour Congress to the Prime Minister provides some background on the Ontario dispute: Continue reading
Filed under: Culture, Economics, Ephemera, Myself, Policy, Politics, Sociology, Statistics, Thought
Fig 1: Vodun magic Continue reading
cutandplante 