905 wants its money back

Something I didn’t realize until I read a Toronto Star article on issues affecting cities in the GTA: the outer suburban cities are required to pay Toronto a certain sum of money every year. This redistribution, sometimes called the “Toronto tax”, helps defray the costs of social services in the GTA. Presumably, it exists because the poor and needy of the entire region tend to migrate to the downtown core, and because residents of the outer cities use Toronto’s infrastructure.

According to the article, York Region pays $95 million a year, Peel pays roughly $60 million, and Halton about $40 million. These sums are paid by local property taxpayers. The outer cities are complaining about this; even Toronto politicians are agreeing that these payments should be picked up by the provincial government.

In their final pre-election budget, the Liberals pledged to eliminate these payments over seven years. But the mayors of these cities want the phase-out period reduced to three years.

I agree that these costs should not be borne by the cities in the 905 region – the province should deal with this. But, since I’m pessimistic about all things Toronto, I wonder: will the province just phase out these payments, and not give Toronto any alternative source of revenue in return? Is this yet another burden to be dumped on the poor, weary Toronto taxpayer?

I just love that new blog smell

Hi. If you’ve gotten here, you’ve found the nice shiny new version of my blog. I’m still playing with the layout a bit – I took their rounded transparent theme and changed all the gray to blue, and I have to fix up the fonts.

Hopefully, I’ll have enough web space to maintain this blog on my own site. If not, I’ll have to move again. Sigh.

Today, I saw a TTC bus, obviously out of service, whose destination was DOWNLOAD. I’ve never seen a bus have a blue screen of death before.

Not a good idea, parts 1 and 2

This afternoon, I was exiting the subway at the west exit of the Bloor-Danforth subway platform. This is the exit that bypasses the Yonge-University line and goes straight up to Yonge Street. Because this exit isn’t used much, you use a revolving gate instead of a turnstile to exit.

If you’re not familiar with the TTC’s revolving gates, let me see if I can describe one to you: it’s like a revolving door, except that it has horizontal metal bars instead of glass panels, and there’s a barrier to keep people from revolving all the way around and back into the station. The basic idea is that it lets people out but doesn’t allow people in. Got it? A friend of mine used to call these gates “people strainers”.

When I got to the exit gate, a man was just getting through it. After he left, he felt compelled to put the gate back in the condition he found it, so he abruptly stopped its motion as I was about to enter. He wasn’t being malicious – it was just an instinctive act of tidying up. But I have no idea what he was thinking. Had I been in the gate, I probably would have been somewhat injured, as I would have been people-strained.

I looked at him, politely but questioningly, as if to say, “Dude – what the?” He looked startled, and then rueful. And then he realized that this exit didn’t lead to the Yonge subway, and slunk back in. Just another day on earth…

I was surfing the net tonight, and ran across a site claiming to list the bird courses offered by Canadian universities. (Of course, “bird” in this context means “easy”.) I looked up the list for my alma mater, the University of Waterloo, and discovered that the data there is not entirely reliable: CS 452 – Introduction To Real-Time Programming is listed as a bird course. As the recommendation puts it, “Easiest course ever! Earning credits for playing around with trains, how easy is that!?”

When I was in school, taking this course meant that you had no life for four months, as you were doomed to spend all your time in the lab. I avoided it like the plague.

Cool pictures

Yesterday, while searching for random images, I ran across Today’s Inspiration. This blog discusses illustrations from the 1940s and 1950s. If you’re into this stuff (as I am), you should check it out.

And I know I’ve mentioned it before, but Shorpy, The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog also totally rocks my world.

Attack, attack, attack!

I’m watching the baseball game this afternoon, and I’ve seen three attack ads from the Ontario Progressive Conservatives in the last two innings. They all hammer on the same point: Dalton McGuinty has broken his promises.

The problem with this is that I already know what Dalton McGuinty has done. What I want to know is what John Tory is likely to do. These ads don’t give me any help with that.

Politicians on tour, and Thomas Frank’s view of the market

We’re in the middle of a provincial election campaign in Ontario. Whenever there’s an election in my part of the world, I stand a good chance of having many of the candidates come right to my door. This is because I live in a 21-story building – campaigners can get the message out to dozens of people without having to travel too far. And those candidates that I don’t meet in person in my building are likely to be waiting, campaign literature in hand, at Broadview subway station on a weekday morning, hoping to catch commuters on their way to work.

My current sitting MPP, Peter Tabuns, holds the record for most visits. I’ve met him three times now: once for the current election, once for the by-election in which he got his seat, and once when he was helping a candidate for the most recent Toronto municipal election. You have to give him credit for getting himself out there.

Just re-read the following, from Thomas Frank’s “The God That Sucked”, and found it thought-provoking enough to quote here:

The market is a god that sucks. Yes, it cashed a few out at the tippy-top, piled up the loot of the world at their feet, delivered shiny Lexuses into the driveways of their ten-bedroom suburban chateaux. But for the rest of us the very principles that make the market the object of D’Souza’s worship, of Gilder’s awestruck piety, are the forces that conspire to make life shitty in a million ways great and small. The market is the reason that our housing is so expensive. It is the reason our public transportation is lousy. It is the reason our cities sprawl idiotically all across the map. It is the reason our word-processing programs stink and our medicine costs more than anyone else’s. In order that a fortunate few might enjoy a kind of prosperity unequaled in human history, the rest of us have had to abandon ourselves to a lifetime of casual employment, to unquestioning obedience within an ever-more-arbitrary and despotic corporate regime, to medical care available on a maybe/maybe-not basis, to a housing market interested in catering only to the fortunate.

My own belief is that, somewhere down the line, something went wrong with the free market system. Ideally, the market should provide quality goods for customers, a decent living wage for employees, and a fair return for investors. Right now, the market seems to be only providing the latter. How do we fix this?

Go home

If you’re fond of mashups, you might want to know about this: Mark Vidler of Go Home Productions has put his entire catalogue up on the Web for downloading.

(Mashups, as you probably know already, are the result of two or more songs mixed together.)

Maybe you can get too much exercise

Something I keep forgetting: if I go for a long walk, and then sit on a public transit vehicle for half an hour, I get one or more sore thigh muscles. They hurt like a son of a bitch at times. And how do you rest a sore muscle when sitting or lying down aggravates the injury? Argh.

Anyway, enough whining. Yesterday, I received not one, but two registration notices for the upcoming election: one for me, and one for somebody I’ve never heard of, who apparently lived at my address some time ago. Since I’ve lived where I am for over 6 1/2 years, and somebody other than the name on the other notice lived there before me, I’m wondering where the provincial electoral officers are getting their voters lists from.

The University of Waterloo (my alma mater) is trying to sell me life insurance (emphasis theirs):

Please remember – the comparison-shopping has been done for you. We proudly recommend this plan as one special alumni advantage you can’t afford to overlook. And, because the whole idea of insurance is protection against the unexpected at any time, now is the time to act.

How do they decide where to put the bold-facing?

I think it’s kind of cool that the Canadian dollar has now reached parity with the American dollar. For one thing, it means that if I buy any books, I’m going to buy them online with American sellers and save a whole whack of money. (An increase in cross-border shopping will no doubt lead to Canadian retailers lobbying for heavy customs duties on imported purchases. They may be doing this already.) But I wonder: if the Canadian dollar keeps appreciating, will we have to throw away all our American spare change?

For years, Canadian retailers have treated American pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters as equivalent to Canadian: it’s too much of a hassle to sort between them, and the difference between the currencies was never too great to worry about. But if an American quarter suddenly becomes significantly less valuable than a Canadian one, will people start refusing to take them?

Down comes the curtain

I don’t think I’ve ever seen summer end so abruptly. At 4:00 today, it was about 29C and sunny, and people were swimming in my building’s pool. I am writing this just before 6:30, and it’s now 14C and raining. It’s as if the show has ended and Mother Nature has pulled down the curtain: it’s time to go home, everybody.

Away, my songs

This morning, I got another meaningless spam message. The subject header was “hcjqx”, which suggests that somebody was testing out their spambombing software.

Here’s the message, in its entirety:

Traces of those deep cuts lie thickly upon
Again awaken from your being gone to find
Point, after all, when finally one reaches
Preface to the 1948 Edition
to matter, for the flushed boys are muscular
Is it almost honey, is it snow?
The winged winds, captives of that age-old foe
Away, my songs, must we goat balls hit again and again toward her offspring

It’s spam poetry, is what it is. I love it. The second and third-last lines rhyme, even.