For My American Brothers & Sisters: the joys of dual income tax returns

Last US election, there was a certain desperation amongst intelligent "liberal" Americans that led to idle thoughts of and internet memes about emigration to Canada, or even secession and union, which didn't pan out of course (just try and explain "red tory" to an american and watch their eyes' spin-- UEL all the way, baby!). This time around, while it seems certain that the long US nightmare of kulturkampf repugly rule is going to finally end, the economic situation may still result in a vast economic sucking sound, this time at the northern border. Because, Nom de Dieu! et Sacre Bleu! et Tabernac!, somehow or other the Canadian financial system has proved, at least this far, to be about the most robust in the developed world. Go figure.

And as primary resource extractors, you'd think that we'd be in trouble in an economic slow-down, but this time around, I really think not. As McCain blindly claimed, but accurately from a Western Canadian point of view, the fundamentals are actually pretty strong: people are still going to need timber, minerals, food, and of course, crude (while oil prices have fluctuated wildly, they have shown no sign at all of dropping even close to the Fort MacMurray profitability point). The world stocks of these things are short, and there is little elasticity in the market. To be sure, some of these industries are kinda capital intensive, which will be a problem in the short term, but nevertheless, the markets aren't going away, and if any industrial sectors have capital and liquidity these days, it is Big Oil and Big Metal. And agribusiness has political backing like no other industry in the world; they will be like totally sheltered from liquidity crunches like no other industry, and for once, for once, given the medium to long-term environmental future, that might just be a Good Thing.

More importantly, neither are the demographics going to change, which means no matter how severe and disruptive the economic downturn may be, in most occupations outside of R&D and other long-term capital heavy investment type things, this may be a real oddity: an unemploymentless economic downturn. At least for Western Canadians, things may suck a bit more for Central Canada (things are already, actually); well, instead of internal immigration from Cape Breton, we'll start getting it from Oshawa. We can deal with that.

I spent most of today working on a galley-rush type proposal to a very large employer indeed, to provide services for Temporary Foreign Workers (ie the Canadian version of "guest workers"), and what was notable about it was the (very hard-headed & realistic I thought) expectation that a good chunk of them were going to be American. In the cause of which, I have actually had to start writing an orientation program for Americans finding themselves living in Canada for a while, and what makes it especially interesting, as kind of second class (if likely highly paid) residents (and emphatically not citizens to boot, go line up there with the rest of the Mexicans and Filipinos and Chinks and Pakies Asians, you know the brown people, ha ha). OK, I gloat a little, enjoy the shadenfreud a little, I'm human too.

I mean there have been an awful lot of humorous and/or satirical versions of this over the last few years (I was thinking about rounding the links up, but hey, if you read this, likely you have already seen them all, from both sides of the border); but today, I was confronted by having to come up with the Real Thing.

Now, some of the arrivals may well be Northern Liberal "refugees," but actually I think it quite likely that they will be fairly representative of the US population; if anything, somewhat weighted to Red State populations where they are more likely to get the economic hit. This actually won't be hard for me, I have been settling populations with political views I most emphatically don't share, all my professional life, though given the rigidities of the US conservative mind-set, I may be dealing with a bit more culture shock than I do from say folks from communist China or even the back hills of Afghanistan (sorry, just joshing there).

I actually think it might be kind of a real problem though; people making a transition to someplace really strange, that they know and see in every way is really strange, are perhaps more able to make a major leap from prior attitudes and articles of faith. It might be a lot harder for Americans, where things are simultaneously so superficially, and fundamentally so similar, yet so very different on a day to day live your life level.

I'm just starting to think this problem through, and groping for ideas. Well, advance thinking only takes you so far; in my business, you had better be very prepared for the rude shocks that reality regularly and roughly gives any kind of theory. Because it always does.

In essence, I have to explain to a heavy duty equipment mechanic or industrial electrician from say Arkansas or Texas, and his or her family, how to function on a day to day basis in Canada, and even kind of feel like you belong a bit, and feel good enough about it to stick around. This is a non-trivial problem.

At a minimum, I can explain how the joy of dual income tax return filing works from personal experience. The short version? It truly deeply suxorz.

(Hey Tim, you want to suggest a good long-term growth inherently open-source project for unemployed coders? Howabout a basic wage-earner type tax return program that can take your basic data and interface with multiple jurisdiction tax authorities simultaneously?)

If continued....

Politics and Explanations

One of the cool things about being a parent is when you get to try and explain current events to your children. This isn't necessarily propaganda; my kids disagree with me pretty stiffly on a few things. Well, teenagers and fascist instincts go together like jam and peanut butter really, I think because they have spent their whole lives mostly in a pretty fascist system (both school and home, are pretty fascist places really, from a kid's point of view). But I have really enjoyed explaining both the financial melt-down to them (the looks on their faces when they finally understand what the Wall Street clowns were doing is priceless; conceptually, I think even a reasonably bright 8 year old could understand it), and our current elections. Elections plural, as in both Canada and the US.

Now it was hard to explain to them, hell to anybody sane, why McCain appeared to have a ghost of a chance a couple of weeks ago; now that Obama appears to have the thing pretty much sewn up, it makes more sense. The Canadian election, being parliamentary not presidential, and thus much harder to predict, is another matter. But in the course of a windy explanation of things, I tossed off the phrase "consent of the governed" and their faces lit up, it suddenly all made more sense to them than it still does to me, frankly. Well maybe at the end of the day their naivete is wiser than my cynicism; maybe at the end of the day that is all there is: democracy is a way of buying us off enough that we don't put our signeurs' heads on pikes any more. Pity, really; direct democracy has its satisfactions.

As usual, I am going to have a hard time voting. All of the parties have at least one major policy plank I very strongly disagree with. And all of them have something in their style or methodology or track-record I find very off-putting. If I could, once again I would like to vote Bloc; aside from the whole separatism thing, which appears to be kind of a moot point these days, their positions on pretty much every issue I give a damn about are pretty much bang on.

Well, as usual, I will revert to voting for the best local candidate and not the party, which is how a parliament should function anyway. In my riding it won't be that hard to pick a candidate. It especially won't be hard to know who not to vote for: the godfather of Bill C-61, or as the NDP christened him, "The Minister of 8-Tracks" is my current MP. He was supposed to be one of the brighter lights of the PC front bench; if so, the PC front bench must be a pretty gloomy place, you know, moths bashing against the screen and dimly seen bats flapping away into the murk to the croaks of the frogs and the distant howl of coyotes.

While I (obviously) detest his party and government, I must admit to a rather high degree of respect for Harper himself. The dude is really smart and together, I (and apparently only I) thought he basically kicked everyone else's ass up and down the street in the debate. Well, my political affiliation might best be described as what used to be known as a "Red Tory," really really red in my case, but after all I did bring myself to vote for Joe Clark once since he was my MP, and actually felt honored to do so. Which is perhaps why I am so alone in today's political climate, Red Tories are few and far between these days. As are, come to think of it, old-style CCFers, the only other political tradition I could feel somewhat comfortable with.

If continued....

I got rickrolled and I love it

I have a number of odd theories, and the one that pisses big bro off the most is something the Michener discovered in his execrable 1962 novel Caravans (all of his novels are execrable and I have read them all; one of the memes of my own life is that whenever I am stuck somewhere with nothing to do or watch, the only available reading material will be an execrable Michener novel): the quality of a geek's sound system is in inverse proportion to his taste in music.

To me, this is almost self-evident; anything new and exciting and deeply creative was likely not first discovered by a subscriber to High End Audio or whatever, it was almost invariably heard over a tinny radio in a car or in some teenager's basement or for that matter hammered out on a defective piano in a whorehouse.

Nowadays, it isn't your geeky hi-fi you brag about, it's your geeky hi-def video system. Tarantino has pretty much established that the quality of the movie can actually be enhanced by shoddy presentation. And I note that xkcd has discovered this too.

A case in point. This is totally amazing. If you want to be rickrolled, and you will be, you should pause to admire the technical virtuosity that went into producing a hi-def youtube experience. Rickroll Link.

If continued....

Vermin

At work we have a problem. It turns out to be a pretty intractable problem.

We operate a number of transitional housing projects, places we can stow people with a variety of housing issues and keep them off the street while we stabilize their situations. Which, frankly, we are pretty good at.

But one of the facilities now has bedbugs. Now all I knew about bedbugs up to a few months ago was what I learnt as a kid, not to let them bite when I went to sleep. But now I know a whole lot more, and it is very much non-comforting.

I first became dimly aware of the issue about 15 years ago, the first time my son came home with a head-lice infestation. Head lice infestations among elementary students in North America these days are approaching pandemic status, and are almost par for the course; if you child doesn't get them at least three times by Grade 6 you are very very lucky, or bringing your child up in a bubble.

They are almost impossible to remove too, there are two major chemical treatments, and the last infestation we had, we had to use both in alternation, twice each, to solve the problem. The dead hand of Darwin reaching out, really, they are getting more and more resistant. I expect to see a lot of shaved head kids in the future.

I have been ridiculously pleased over the last decade or so at the highly visible return of wildlife, at least to the Canadian West. I see deer almost every week, somewhere in the city, nibbling things along the freeways. One of our facilities has not had any meaningful flowers or shrubbery for years now, because of the infestation of rabbits. (The best rabbits inhabit the grounds of Winnipeg's airport; those dudes are like giant rabbits, the earth shakes as they hop alongside the runway, sort of like Night of the Lupus creatures really.)

My own house, well, aside from very regular rabbit visitors, we have a skunk that comes by pretty regularly, and a week or two ago brought its girl/boyfriend. They are gorgeously beautiful animals, but having smelt the odd farm dog and truck that had had a run in with them, I am terrified of them, and slam all the doors and windows and cower inside until they wander off.

In August, a moose broke into the university and then into a building, where it rampaged up and down the halls having a grand old time eating junk food and smashing furniture until finally tranquilized.

And I didn't realize it myself, but the damage all the deer are doing to gardens, nurseries, new plantings, parks generally, etc., is getting out of hand. Hell, the crows are getting aggressive enough to attack preschool children that approach anywhere near a nest, which these days, is pretty near anything because there are so many of them. To say nothing of the omnipresent Canada Geese, which eat everything greeen down to a nub and shit all over everything and when they have kids, are very large and aggressive and scary.

A lot of the larger fauna presence has to do with the current decline of hunting of course. But the vermin, that is another matter. Even Sarah Palin was never much for gunning down bugs and rodents from an airplane.

Most of the stories on bedbugs blame foreign travelers. Right, poor unhygienic brown people only started visiting the West in the last decade, sure. More surely, it has a lot to do with banning of broad spectrum pesticides like DDT and so on, and the ongoing move to more and more biofriendly alternatives. Which, I want to make clear, I think is a good idea. But it has a downside.

In the meantime, I have to pay the mouse and cockroach exterminators a retainer and regular fee to do our kitchens and daycares three times a year, and have to call them in for an infestation at least once more every year. They use exceedinlgy biofriendly tactics. I remember as a kid in the Middle East, a once a year fumigation with dangerous and smelly chemicals was enough to keep the vermin at sort of a tolerable level.

And to get back to the bedbugs. Bedbugs are almost impossible to irradicate. Our exterminator's advice is to evacuate the building and dose it and then leave it vacant and bare for at least a year. Because believe it or not, bedbugs can live a year between meals. And it is impossible to get them all, because they can hide almost anywhere, penetrate almost any kind of wall, survive in the unlikliest places, and transport themselves in so many vectors that you almost want to cry. And they only eat blood, so most bait type poisons, which is most of them these days, are utterly ineffective. The only good news is that they aren't (yet) a vector for any disease. They are just disgusting, and itchy.

Hotels really don't want to talk about it, but almost all of them are infested now. They keep the bugs down, with cement walls that don't let them through (much), with ferocious vacuuming policies and with laundrying everything to crazy and drying everything at insanely high heats. Next time you are in a hotel, check your room's baseboards: they will look pretty new and clean, because they are new, frequently replaced, frequently cleaned and disinfected, and still home to hordes of little bloodsuckers. You will probably notice that your matress is crinklier than it is used to be, because it has some kind of sealed plastic layer. That is because it is sealed and regularly disinfected, and replaced very very frequently.

And they still can't get rid of the bedbugs, just keep them down.

I think global warming aside, one piece of bad news about the future is that we as a race are about to return to a much closer relationship with our parasites and symbiotes and yes vermin of all sizes, than we we have known for a couple of generations, at least here in the 1st world. It isn't a comfortable thought.

It's kind of an itchy thought, really.

If continued....