Quoderat: what was

Dual-licensing is a popular Open Source business model, especially using the (very restrictive) Gnu General Public License (GPL). Popular opinion, as reflected (for example) in the comments on this blog posting, says that it’s either forbidden or highly questionable to do things like linking non-GPL things with GPL things, so enterprises will have to buy a dual-licensed version (instead of using the free GPL version of the software) to take advantage of closed-source enterprise components.

I discovered an interesting link scam in my inbox this morning, with the subject line “New Chicago O’Hare International Airport website”. The message informed me that Chicago O’Hare Airport has a new website at ohare-airport.org, and asked me to update my link to the airport. The link points to a pretty credible looking site, with arrivals and departures information, ground transportation, and even a privacy policy (!) The only clue that something’s wrong is the very vague copyright information (”© Airport Administration Services”) and the lack of a phone number or mailing address on the contact page.

I run a community airport website named OurAirports, so it’s not unusual for me to get e-mail from smaller airports and flying clubs with updates, but big airports have never bothered with me.

As one would expect, O’Hare Airport’s existing web site makes no mention of a new, updated site. In this scam the scammer is not phishing for personal information or trying to scam money, but instead, is trying to get pagerank over the official O’Hare site by tricking thousands of sites into providing links.

What are they looking for? Given that the e-mail traces back to a site called huntparking.com, I’ll guess that they want to use the web traffic either to sell ads for airport parking or to sell their own parking.

The e-mail and whois info are below. Nicely done, by the way — the fake site is much better designed than O’Hare’s real site, and even the markup snippet in the e-mail is XHTML-compatible. Perhaps O’Hare Airport should consider hiring the designer instead of bringing charges.

The message

Message-ID: <D81A47BF68444410B84578142FC73DED@UserPC>
From: "Chicago O'Hare Airport" 
To: [removed]
Subject: New Chicago O’Hare International Airport website
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset=”iso-8859-1″
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Mailer: Microsoft Windows Mail 6.0.6001.18000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.0.6001.18049
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - host.huntparking.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - ourairports.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [47 12] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - ohare-airport.org

To whom it may concern:

We are proud to announce the launch of the new Chicago O’Hare =
International Airport website www.ohare-airport.org. It provides =
comprehensive real time flight information on arrivals, departures and =
delays, terminals and maps, parking, transportation, directions, food =
and shopping, hotels, etc.

If you find our website to be of value to you and your readers, we would =
appreciate it if you could add a link to us at your URL =
http://www.ourairports.com/airports/KORD/ where, in our opinion, it =
would be the most relevant.=20

Alternatively, you can utilize the customized link code provided below =
(just cut and paste):

<p><a href=3D”http://www.ohare-airport.org”>Chicago O’Hare =
airport</a></p>

If you have any questions, please, do not hesitate to contact us. Thank =
you for your time and consideration.

Kind regards,

Natalia Klimovich
Website Administrator
www.ohare-airport.org

Whois Information for ohare-airport.org

Domain ID:D155295366-LROR
Domain Name:OHARE-AIRPORT.ORG
Created On:07-Feb-2009 08:45:01 UTC
Last Updated On:09-Apr-2009 03:54:26 UTC
Expiration Date:07-Feb-2010 08:45:01 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:GoDaddy.com, Inc. (R91-LROR)
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT RENEW PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:GODA-059235088
Registrant Name:Alexei Pavlovitch
Registrant Street1:240 E Illinois
Registrant Street2:apt 1202
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Chicago
Registrant State/Province:Illinois
Registrant Postal Code:60611
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.3125936015
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:alex.pavlovitch@gmail.com
Admin ID:GODA-259235088
Admin Name:Alexei Pavlovitch
Admin Street1:240 E Illinois
Admin Street2:apt 1202
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Chicago
Admin State/Province:Illinois
Admin Postal Code:60611
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.3125936015
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:alex.pavlovitch@gmail.com
Tech ID:GODA-159235088
Tech Name:Alexei Pavlovitch
Tech Street1:240 E Illinois
Tech Street2:apt 1202
Tech Street3:
Tech City:Chicago
Tech State/Province:Illinois
Tech Postal Code:60611
Tech Country:US
Tech Phone:+1.3125936015
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email:alex.pavlovitch@gmail.com
Name Server:NS07.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server:NS08.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:

Tom Megginson is a Canadian advertising guy who’s spending a lot of time with social media. He’s just launched a new blog, Change Marketing.

Nepotism aside …

I think I would have included a link to this blog even if he weren’t my brother’s, because of passages like this:

Branding accesses our very nature as social animals, taking advantage of the good feelings we get out of loyalty and admiration towards other human beings in our tribe. But in the case of companies and products, the personality traits are conjured up in an anthropomorphic emotional construct. We “like” favourite brands. We “trust” them. And most importantly, we make them part of our tribal identity.

and this:

Traditional marketers consider setting up a Facebook presence as something you DO. The problem is, the presence is all about who you ARE.

(From Social Media: Brand, don’t sell.)

I’m looking for February or March numbers, but according to Teranet and the National Bank of Canada, as of January 2009, house prices across Canada had dropped only 2.35% since January 2008 (that’s using CHPI, which is the more negative of the two major indices). Here’s a breakdown by major cities:

Why the disparity? Calgary is an oil city. When the recession hit and resource prices tanked, Calgary was the centre of a huge housing bubble because of high oil prices, and Vancouver was in a major real-estate bubble of its own because of the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics, so both had further to fall — they’re just adjusting back to realistic market prices.

Toronto is the financial centre of Canada, and we all know what happened to the finance industry, but it has a very wide employment base outside of finance, and vibrant immigrant community, and a lot of pent-up housing demand, so I’m not surprised to see a more moderate fall there.

Ottawa is the capital, so it has government jobs as a cushion, but it’s also one of Canada’s leading tech centres. While big companies like Nortel and Corel are in terminal decline, small tech companies around Ottawa are doing very well. I live here, and as far as I can tell, for-sale signs on lawns still don’t stay up too long.

Montreal. Montreal? It was the awkward poor sibling of big Canadian cities for a couple decades after the whole separatism thing started (and people and head offices fled to Ottawa and Toronto), but it’s been coming back recently — the streets aren’t as dirty, the heroin addicts are panhandling more politely, and after all, it’s still Montreal. Just like Manhattan in the 1970s at its dirtiest and most dysfunctional was still more fun than any other U.S. city, Montreal will always be the coolest Canadian city to visit. The suburban (and English-speaking) west end of the island is a huge centre for pharmaceutical companies, and perhaps they’re doing well in the recession (I haven’t checked).

Not much to say about Halifax, which is a much smaller city than the others, except that it’s a nice place, and I’m glad to see they’re doing well.

Perhaps when I find February or March figures, the news will be worse; then again, as a measurement tool, CHPI can make things look a lot worse than RSPI, so it’s just as likely that things are better than these number suggest.

I thought it would be interesting to run a simple test for Canada — take some key economic indicators, and see how far we’ve slipped. Here’s what I’ve tracked down so far:

Basically, we’ve slipped back to between 2004 and 2007, depending on which indicator you look at (a little further, probably, if I included stock market indices). That’s not great (and our population is a bit larger), but ask yourself this: how did you feel in 2004? Were you as worried as you are now? Did it feel like a depression then?

I know things aren’t great — especially for people who’ve been laid off and/or lost their retirement savings or homes — but I think the (mainly left-wing) pundits (journalists, bloggers, and politicians) who keep screaming words like “depression” are just exploiting fear to try to get more attention for themselves, just like the (mainly right-wing) pundits did with anti-terrorism fears after 2001-09-11.

It’s a vicious circle, because they have to keep upping the ante to stand out from the others, until we’re all convinced we’ll be standing in soup lines tomorrow (assuming anyone can afford to supply us with soup).

In Canada, people who have served time for a wrongful murder conviction become famous — very famous — and stay that way for years and decades. Steven Truscott, Donald Marshall Jr., David Milgaard, and Guy Paul Morin are arguably household names, better known than many celebrities (including most medal-winning Canadian Olympic athletes, award-winning musicians, etc.)

Truscott’s initial wrongful conviction took place 40 years ago, but if anything, he’s better known now than any time before. Three men with more recentky-overturned convictions — Robert Baltovich, Bill Mullins-Johnson, and James Driskell — are also getting on-going press coverage, TV documentaries, etc.

I had never thought anything unusual about this phenomenon, until the Mullins-Johnson article was suddenly deleted from Wikipedia, with no debate — the Wikipedia editor had assumed that a wrongful conviction was so obviously unnotable that no discussion was required, but when I objected, he did restore the article and start a proper RFD debate.

When Wikipedia has articles about minor, imaginary videogame characters, it seemed unimaginable to me at first that editors would try to delete an article about a real, famous person, but so far, there seems little support for keeping the article. Thinking about it, I suddenly realized that the wrongfully-convicted aren’t famous in the U.S. Sure, I could Google around and find a few names, but in the U.S., serving 10 years for a murder you didn’t commit does not automatically make you a household name — in fact, it might not even result in a national news story.

Perhaps there’s a strong feeling of discomfort around the issue in a country that still executes so many of its citizens. Or perhaps, because the wrongly-convicted often have prior criminal records, Americans don’t feel that their convictions were such a serious injustice. Many U.S. jurisdictions (all?) have very small limits on the compensation you can receive for a wrongful conviction, while in Canada, someone who has been in jail for years could receive well over $1M — a big news story in itself.

I have a conflict of interest with the RFD for the Bill Mullins-Johnson article because I was the original author (though many others have since contributed), but if the article is going to be deleted, I’d hate it to be simply from lack of debate. So, Wikipedia users, whether you agree or disagree with me, please visit the RFD page and have your say.

Whether you’re writing a business plan for your personal startup (the tech equivalent of the Great American Novel that every hack journalist plans to write), a report for your customers, or a proposal for your managers, sooner or later you’re going to have to describe a customer problem — the justification for creating a product or launching a project.

Frankly, the majority of customer problem descriptions I’ve seen and heard — including those I’ve been involved in — have been either poorly thought out or complete B.S. I know I won’t always be allowed to use this, but as a consultant and as a poor fool who still dreams of his own startup, I’ve written a checklist of six criteria that a real customer problem must meet:

1. It uses the customer’s language, not yours — if any words or ideas need to be defined or explained, then it’s probably not really a customer problem.

2. It describes a business need — it should not mention the proposed technical solution (such as a social network, CMS, etc.).

3. It is recognizable — the customer is already familiar with the problem or with a very similar one, and doesn’t need to be convinced that the problem exists (thought she might not be aware of its severity).

4. It is quantifiable — even if you can’t assign a number yet, it is the kind of problem that has a cost expressed in concrete units such as money, time, subscriptions, support calls, page views, etc.

5. It is compelling — you can demonstrate potential benefits, savings, etc. that justify the time, cost, and effort for the customer to try to solve it.

6. It is succinct — you can describe summarize the problem meaningfully in a single, short sentence (of course, you’re always free to elaborate it somewhere else).

The passing grade on this checklist is 100%. If only one checklist item is missing, the problem is likely just wishful thinking — if your product or project succeeds, it will be despite your idea of the problem, not because of it.

Note: It’s actually easy to come up with problem descriptions that meet all six criteria; what’s hard is coming up with problem descriptions that meet all six criteria and have credible technical solutions.

Update: Bell quickly backed down — Tweets will be billed just like any other text messages. Interesting that a little web company was able to beat a huge telco on this one.

Facebook and other US sites have no problem sending SMS messages to my Canadian cell phone, but Twitter hasn’t had as much luck — maybe they’ve been looking for ways to avoid paying bulk SMS charges. However, they recently announced that customers of Bell Mobility (one of Canada’s big two wireless providers) can now send and receive tweets again, with “no limits and no added fees (beyond your normal texting plan).”

Not so, says Bell. According to this story, Bell Mobility is treating Twitter as a “premium service”, and will charge CAD 0.15 for every tweet sent or received, no matter what text plan you have.

That’s actually worse than the status quo. On my Canadian Rogers cell phone, I can’t receive tweets right now, but I don’t pay anything extra to send them with my current text plan.

I guess I’ll stick with Facebook status updates instead. They work fine with Canadian phones, and Rogers hasn’t (yet) decided that they’re a premium service.

Last week, international media outlets reported that American Jennifer Figge had become (or claimed to have become) the first woman to “swim the Atlantic” — the BBC story is pretty typical.

According to the initial stories, Figge swam from the Cape Verde Islands to Trinidad (3,380 km direct distance) in 24 days, spending up to 8 hours/day in the water. Since this is a tech blog, I know that you’ve all already started to do the arithmetic, and you’re right. Even in the ideal case (no course deviations, 8 hours/day swimming), she would have had to maintain an average pace of 17.6 km/hr to pull that off. She did have the benefit of swimming with the North Equatorial Current at her back — it’s a weak current, but let’s allow her 0.6 km/hr for it, leaving an average required pace of 17.0 km/hr.

The men’s world record for 50m freestyle (front crawl) swimming is currently 21.8 seconds, or 8.3 km/hr. That includes a huge initial speed-up from the leap off the podium, and even then, the pace the brings the world’s top elite swimmers to absolute exhaustion in only 0.05 km. It also takes place in a calm swimming pool with a swimmer wearing a speedo, rather than against huge ocean swells with the swimmer wearing a wetsuit. Even in the pool, no one could keep up that pace for minutes, much less hours or days.

In fact, it was soon confirmed that Figge swam only about 400 kilometers over those 24 days: an impressive distance for an amateur athlete at any age, much less in her 50s, but not the distance across the Atlantic Ocean.

So I guess that “swimming the Atlantic” does not mean the same as “swimming across the Atlantic.” I’m curious about what it does mean, because there are two other people who became famous for “swimming the Atlantic”:

• Guy Delage claimed to have swum the Atlantic with the assistance of a kickboard, covering 2,100 nautical miles (3,889 kilometers) in 51 days. Even assuming 8 hours/day, that works out to an average pace of 9.5 km/hr.
• Benoît Lecomte claimed to have swum the Atlantic unassisted, covering 3,716 miles (5,980 km) in 72 days, swimming 6–8 hours/day. Even assuming 8 hours every day, that works out to an average pace of 10.4 km/hr.

By contrast, in swimming across Lake Ontario in 1959, Marilyn Bell took 21 hours to cover 52 kilometers direct distance, for an average pace of 2.5 km/hr. People have called even that into question, since with currents and primitive navigation equipment in the support boat, she may have actually had to cover a much greater distance, but at least it doesn’t strain credibility.

(The original title of this posting was “Swimming the Atlantic” vs. grade-four arithmetic, but that seemed to be tempting fate, since I’ve likely made at least one arithmetic error in this posting.)

OurAirports lets members tag airports to create different kinds of maps. I’ve created two maps that show very vividly where the intersections of people, money, and land occur in the world.

Welcome to the club …

The first tag, top150, shows the world’s 150 busiest airports by passenger traffic (as of 2007). Central Africa has lots of people, but not much money, so it’s empty. Australia and Canada have high per-capita incomes but a low population density, so they also appear mostly empty in the map, with only a handful of top-150 airports each. The U.S. has a lot of land but also a lot of money and a lot of people, so it’s very full. India and the Persian Gulf countries are starting to fill up, as incomes rise and more people travel.

… but not this club

The second tag, top30, shows a much more exclusive club, the world’s 30 busiest airports by passenger traffic. These are the absolute busiest hubs, and it takes a rich and populous city or country to support one. Not by accident, fully half of these airports (15) are in the United States, and 8 more are in Western Europe, leaving only 7 for the rest of the world to share.

In this club, the 1.3 billion citizens of China are represented by only two airports (including Hong Kong), and the 1.2 billion citizens of India are not represented at all. Canada and Australia also don’t make the cut (too few people).

Of course, there are other considerations: aside from its money, land, and people, the heavy air passenger traffic in the U.S. may also reflect its horrendous rail system.

No, this isn’t a porn title: here’s a claim that Roman civilization collapsed partly because Europe passed “peak wood”.

Let’s leave aside the question of what Roman civilization means, and whether it collapsed in 44 BC, 391 AD, 395, 476, 1453, or some other date. If I remember correctly, much Western European farmland reverted to forest after the Black Death of the 14th century, where there was a huge decline in available farm labour — there’s actually more forest in many parts of Europe now than there was before the Bubonic plague.

And that’s the problem with tossing around silly phrases like “peak wood” — you don’t have to do anything to reforest — just stop working to keep the forest away. If all humans left North America for 20 years and then returned, we’d find that our farmers’ fields, sports stadiums, backyards, parking lots, and even city streets were already well on their way back to being forests. Fossil fuels, unfortunately, don’t work that way (at least not in a human time frame).

In my home province, Ontario, it’s now illegal to smoke in a car with a child in it [story]. Another sign of a growing nanny state?

No. A nanny state passes laws to protect people from themselves — “wear a helmet”, “don’t eat trans-fats”, “don’t smoke pot”.

A government passes laws to protect its citizens from each-other — “don’t steal”, “don’t drive drunk”, “don’t attack people with a hockey stick”, or even “don’t do noisy construction work at 3:00 am in a residential area”.

If you’re a hockey player, I support your right to swing your stick, but that right does not extend all the way to my face. If you’re a smoker, I support your right to smoke (tobacco or otherwise), but that right does not extend all the way to my lungs, or to your child’s. There’s nothing nannyish about that.

As North American cities get bigger, and more people drive cars, how are we going to cope with the traffic? Will it be permanent gridlock? It’s gone out of style to bulldoze neighbourhoods to build new freeways, but even if we did that and built more expressways into the city, where would all the cars park when they got here?

We’ve had a glimpse of what that future dystopia might look like here in Ottawa, as our public transit strike has just finished its first month. We’ve had only about 20% more cars on the road, but combined with very cold weather and heavy snow (including blizzards), things have gotten bad. One-way commutes that used to take 45 minutes now sometimes take two and a half hours, and the downtown core completely gridlocks: even as new drivers arrive, the ones came 30 minutes ago are still circling trying to find somewhere to park.

How can any big city survive a traffic nightmare like this? Here are some of the workarounds people have come up with:

• Missing work altogether. I know one doctor who had a four-hour shift scheduled at her suburban hospital before Christmas on the morning of a very heavy snowfall. She called and found out that even if she could make it in, there was an hour-and-a-half line-up to get into the parking lot (even for doctors), so she finally just gave up.

• Time-shifting. Not every job actually requires you to be in from 9-5. People are heading to work a couple of hours early or late and missing the worst of the gridlock. By 7:00 pm, traffic is almost back to normal again, at least in the city core.

• Telecommuting. People are working from home more often than usual, or just as often, working from the nearest coffee shop. They look at the weather forecast, and if it’s bad and their jobs permit, they just stay home.

• Human propulsion. People who live within easy walking distance (5 km/3 miles) of work or school are just walking — its faster, and burns off some of the Starbucks calories. Walking’s not pleasant on days when the windchill drops to -25 degC or worse, but it beats gridlock and fighting for a scarce parking spot. Cycling’s not an option in this weather except for the very brave, but people are also cross-country skiing or skating to work when they can.

• Ride sharing. While it doesn’t help you get to work any faster individually (though it helps in the aggregate), ride sharing is very useful if you have no car, or if it’s difficult to find parking places where you’re heading. Lots of people are car-pooling with co-workers, using ride-sharing web sites, or even just standing by the side of the road holding signs saying where they want to go.

• Private shuttles. The universities set up private shuttles to help at least some students get in for the Christmas exams, and fortunately, the transit union backed down from its threat to block them with picket lines. Some high schools are also offering limited private bus service (Ottawa urban high school and middle school students use public transit, not yellow school buses).

• Fewer parking restrictions. Parking spots in the city core that normally have a 1-, 2-, or 3-hour time limit are now unrestricted, so that commuters can use them (the normal time limit is meant to guarantee that they’re left free for shoppers, etc., so businesses might not be thrilled). People have misinterpreted that and parked in no-parking/no-stopping zones or even in front of hydrants, and have been furious when they’ve been ticketed.

• Helping the vulnerable. Our ParaTranspo service is still operating, and there’s talk about extending it to seniors (so that they’re not shut in). The city is also talking about taxi vouchers for low-income earners whose jobs are at risk.

So over all, a city can cope, even with a crisis like this. Most people I’ve talked to don’t like the strike, but also admit that we’re getting used to living without public transit.

I think we’re missing some real opportunities, though. For example, why not designate one or two lanes on the major highways as carpool-only lanes (minimum 3 occupants)? That way, there would be a significant speed advantage to ride sharing, rather than just a general feeling of virtue. We could do the same with the bus lanes on downtown streets, and let carpoolers just whiz by the gridlock. That’s the kind of thing that we might want to keep even after the strike’s finished.

I’m hearing rumours of small-scale layoffs from a few different places around Ottawa, mostly small-to-medium-sized companies.

Just a single layoff affects dozens of people:

• the person who’s let go
• the person’s family
• the managers who have to do the firing
• the person’s work friends, who’ll miss the lunchtime chats and drinks after work
• the person’s coworkers, who’ll have to pick up the extra load
• people from other organizations or members of the public who had dealings with the person
• the restaurant owner across the street, who always had a special curry set aside for his favorite customer
• (and so on)

When the slowdown became inescapable in November, many companies may have decided to postpone layoffs until after the Christmas holidays, out of kindness. The holidays are over now, and today (January 5) is the first day everyone will be back at work, so there could be a lot of postponed pain hitting all at once.

Are these just a few isolated incidents, or will today be the day that the economic slowdown starts to seem real to people in the tech industry?

When a government spends money, a few things happen:

1. it competes with the private sector for money, driving up inflation (or interest rates)
2. it competes with the private sector for products and services, driving up costs
3. it competes with the private sector for land, driving up property prices
4. it competes with the private sector for workers, driving up salaries

During a boom, these are all bad things — when inflation, costs, and salaries are already too high, government spending just pumps more air into the bubble, leading to an even bigger bust later on (as we’re seeing this time around).

During a bust, it’s a different story. With the spectre of deflation and negative interest rates, more competition for money is a good thing. With companies laying off workers and struggling to stay afloat, more competition for products and services is a good thing. With a collapsing property market, more competition for land is a good thing. And with a huge pool of un- or under-employed workers, more competition for labour is a good thing.

So with so much potential good, why are stimulus packages usually a bad thing?

It’s all in the timing

Spending enough money to actually stimulate the economy out of a recession takes a lot of time. Sure, governments can spend some fixing existing roads and bridges, repairing sewers, etc., but that’s chickenfeed. To spend serious money and put people back to work, they need to do big stuff like new high-speed rail lines or highways, convention centres, etc.

Now, stop and think for a second.

Let’s say that you have access to $20B, right now, to build a high-speed rail line down the U.S. West Coast from Seattle to San Diego. When can you spend it?

First, you need to have public hearings.

Then you need to plan the line.

Then you need to negotiate with all the governments along the way.

Then you need an environmental assessment.

Then you need to put the work out for tender.

Then you need to expropriate some land, and deal with the court challenges from people losing their homes, parks, etc.

Then, 10-20 years later, you can start construction.

Granted, that’s an extreme case, but even something as simple as a new convention centre takes several years from first planning to the start of construction, with design, approval, tender, environmental assessment, etc.

Inflating the next bubble

And there’s the problem. Maybe we’ll still be in a bust in several years, but maybe .. just maybe .. we’ll be in the middle of a world-wide boom.

Then all the money that governments are committing now will go not to pull countries out of the current recession, but to inflate another bubble that could make the next recession even worse.

Are there any options? We could try to plan stimulus packages during the boom, not during the bust, so that they’re ready to go when we actually need them. The problem is, how do you predict a bust 5-10 years in advance? Are contractors and workers willing to wait an uncertain number of years to start work until the next recession is declared?

That is why stimulus attempts mostly fail.

The U.S. Senate made the right choice rejecting the auto industry bailout.

This isn’t about class warfare: it doesn’t bother me that the CEOs took their bizjets from Detroit to Washington (CEOs take private jets so that they have more time to work on running their companies, not to show off), and many of the shareholders who stand to lose are private citizens’ 401Ks and pension funds, not rich industrialists.

This isn’t about environmental concerns: companies will make electric cars as soon as they think they can profit from them (would you buy an electric car as your principal car now, when you have to stop every 2-3 hours and plug it in overnight, the batteries are an environment catastrophe waiting to happen, and a lot of the electricity in the U.S. is generated from dirty coal?).

This isn’t about free-market purism: sometimes even healthy private organisations do need a little bridge financing to get through hard times, and in rare cases the government has to be the financier of last resort.

This is about not prolonging the agony: the existing three major North American car companies are obviously doomed, and all a little more money will do is delay the bankruptcies, mergers, and restructuring that might actually create a vibrant, healthy North American auto industry (maybe just one company instead of three).

No money pit

A bailout would also be a commitment to a money pit — after spending $25B$14B now, would the U.S. government be able to say ‘no’ to more in three months, when the industry burned through the first handout? What about another three months after that?

These aren’t healthy companies going through a rough spot — they were dying slowly even during the boom, when the world auto industry was way over capacity for demand, and Detroit was losing hundreds or thousands of dollars on every car they sold. GM burned through USD 4.2B cash in 2008Q3 alone, and that was mostly before the market meltdown.

Palliative care

The U.S. auto industry won’t disappear, but it has to change, and that change is going to be painful for the workers, their families, and their communities. It’s good that the U.S. government has decided not to make a pointless intervention leading to false hope and prolonged agony; now, though, it’s time to think about palliative care for the industry, while the workers grieve and then move on with their lives. Can the government help? How? $25B$14B to help communities would be a lot more useful than $25B into GM’s, Ford’s, and Chrysler’s petty cash boxes. But how to spend it?

Canada just had an election six weeks ago, but we might have a new Prime Minister and cabinet from a different party in a week or so, without holding another election. What gives?

Background

If you don’t live in a country like Britain, or Australia, that uses the Westminster System, what’s happening in Canada right now — to the extent that you’re paying attention at all — must seem very strange. For our American cousins, here’s how our system lines up with yours:

A question of confidence

Since only our House of Commons — equivalent to the U.S. House of Representatives — is actually elected, it holds all the real power, and the leader of the ruling faction in the House — the Prime Minister — is the effective (but not constitutional) head of state and can appoint the other cabinet ministers (just like the party with a majority in the U.S. House can appoint the committee chairs).

The Prime Minister holds power, however, only to the extent that he or she can keep the confidence of the House of Commons. Any party leader can go to the Governor General and offer to form a government, but by tradition, the G-G will always give the first chance to the leader of the party that won the most seats. If that party has a majority of seats in the House, then forming a government will be a no-brainer (assuming that the leader can maintain party discipline); if the party has only a plurality of seats, then it has to prove that it can control the house and pass its major legislation; if not, then the G-G can offer a different party leader a chance to form a government.

Only MPs are elected

Although this might sound bizarre to people used to the American system, there’s nothing inherently undemocratic about it. Canadians elected 308 Members of Parliament (MPs) earlier this fall; we did not vote directly for a specific Prime Minister or a specific party. The Conservative Party won a plurality of the seats, but not a majority: that doesn’t guarantee them the government, only the first turn to try to form one. The Conservatives are about to bring their first major piece of financial legislation before the House, and if it is defeated, the G-G is required to conclude that the Conservative government does not have the confidence of a majority of the 308 MPs we elected, and (since the last election was so recent) to give another party leader a try if one can make a credible case.

Hubris

Last time around, the Conservatives had no problem governing with a minority government — they just made sure that at least one of the other parties would support each piece of legislation they brought forward, and the opposition parties — especially the Liberals — were too timid to force an election by defeating them. This time, though, the Conservatives foolishly pushed the opposition parties just a little too far, by trying to cut government funding for political parties. This would hurt the opposition much more than the Conservatives (who are better at fund-raising), and whether the move was morally right or wrong, it was politically ignorant.

Suddenly, two of the opposition parties — the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP) — woke up out of their daze and realized that they could vote with the Bloc Québécois to defeat the Conservatives, then join together to form their own government. The Conservatives immediately panicked and withdrew the anti-funding proposal, but the genie was out of the bottle — the Conservatives’ only remaining hope is to try to appease the Bloc enough to keep their support.

Food for Junkies

So if you’re a political junkie who’s still in a slump after the end of the U.S. election, stay tuned — even Canadian politics can be exciting sometimes.

The world banking meltdown is a lot like the Christian Bible: no matter what your personal beliefs, you can find something there, somewhere, to back them up.

Too little regulation? Lenders were able to use credit derivatives (such as collateralized debt obligations) to keep loans off their books, without any reliable way of assessing their risk (and thus, their actual value).

Too much regulation? Basel II (the regulatory response to previous banking crises) forced banks to reassess their reserves daily at market value — if the market started to fall, banks had to convert stocks to cash quickly to avoid falling below minimum reserve levels, massively magnifying even small stock market movements and encouraging banks to use credit derivatives to keep loans off their books.

Sinners? People (especially in the U.S.) went out and bought homes that they could never afford to pay for, on the assumption that home values would keep rising, then kept taking out more money against their mortgages to finance regular consumer spending.

Victims? Some of the financial instruments available to borrowers in the U.S., like negative amortization mortgages (pay less than the interest for the first few years), were deliberately designed to sucker in buyers who hadn’t quite mastered grade 5 math.

Too much government? By taking over bad loans from the banks, governments around the world have sent out the message that banks get to gain in the good times, but will be spared the pain in bad. Do they have any more incentive to be careful the next time around? Besides, all the government borrowing, especially in the U.S., has hardly helped the situation.

Too little government? Central banks could have stopped the housing bubble in its tracks by raising the prime interest rate (say, to 5 or 6% in the U.S.). Year after year, they passed on the opportunity, keeping interest rates low to keep the stock markets artificially high, and pumping more air in the housing bubble, leading to a bigger explosion this year than we really needed.

So, whether you’re a political candidate or just a Starbucks pundit, pick the statements above that best support what you already believe, and run with them. No matter what, you’ll probably be right.

See the update below. I was right: Google’s new bot detection is overly naive, and I’m not the only one having problems.

See also John Cowan’s comment below, for a different (personal) interpretation of Google’s terms of service.

Google Maps won’t show me satellite imagery this morning.

Google has recently set up a system to try to autodetect and block bots scraping their system, and it isn’t working very well — people are getting blocked even from Google Search simply because they have too many (human-generated) queries passing through the same proxy.

This morning, I suddenly discovered a different problem: the satellite view in Google Maps has stopped working for me — I get the “don’t have imagery at this zoom level for this region” error everywhere, at every zoom level. I can still see maps and terrain, but not satellite pics, and I noticed the host sorry.google.com setting a lot of cookies.

Is Google’s satellite imagery down for everyone else this morning, or has their software decided that I’m a bot trying to scrape satellite imagery?

Update

I was right — Google’s software had decided that I was a bot. They have a test link directly to a satellite to see if you’re being blocked:

http://khm0.google.com/kh?v=31&hl=en&x=0&y=0&z=1&s=

It took me to this page. I was able to renable access simply by entering a CAPTCHA.

What happened?

I wrote a couple of months ago about how to detect overzoom in Google Maps. My guess is that the overzoom protection in OurAirports — automatically zooming out every 4 seconds until there were actual satellite tiles available — triggered to bot alert, and I’ve disabled the feature for now.

That’s very bad news for any mashup that uses JavaScript to do more sophisticated things with Google Maps, like, say, panning at regular intervals. Google’s bot detection seems to be extremely naive, and any repeated action at regular intervals will fire it off.

I don’t believe that anything — especially a political argument — can be self-evidently true: people get together in groups and construct their realities, whatever those may be. In my reality, however, there are some arguments that just don’t go well together, and I have a lot of trouble respecting any commentator, politician, or even dinner-table pundit who supports both statements in any of the following pairs.