In the last decade the Dutch have reduced prison inmate populations by 50% and those sentences average to about 90 days in jail. Many people expected this drastic reduction of inmates to lead to a notable increase in crime because:
Dangerous, proven criminals are being quickly released back onto the street
There is virtually no deterrent effect to being jailed in the Netherlands
Contrary to this expectation the fact is that Dutch system has also reduced crime by nearly 40%.
As you can see in the image to the right, the Dutch now use their old prisons as temporary housing for some refugees.
How can that be? In simple terms, it turns out that after thousands of years of trying different forms of incarceration and punishment that Europeans have figured out:
GDPR is the acronym for Europe’s “General Data Protection Regulation” which is the toughest set of personal privacy regulations in the world. You can see from the GDPR Timeline on the right that companies have had about 3 years to get their systems into compliance, and it comes into full Read more…
In general terms the issue is that with low oil prices, oil companies see better places in the world to put their money than Canada. Oil & Gas “activists” will initially claim a victory here because they have had some impact on making it difficult to get Canadian Oil and Gas to both international and domestic markets.
The US congress now has an Artificial Intelligence “Caucus” considering regulating how Artificial Intelligence (AI). One the items they are looking into is figuring out if citizens should have a right to know that they are talking / chatting with an Artificially Intelligent piece of software or a human.
Many people feel tricked when they find out that they have been talking or chatting with an AI when the default assumption has been that people are talking or chatting with human representatives of the company in question. Given the situation today and the obvious fact that AI conversations are going to become more and more human like, it is understandable that governments want to consider the implications.
This 8 minute video covers the FUTURE OF AI ACT that has just been introduced in the US Congress, which focuses on the military and is more broader than our narrow discussion about rights, but it does give you a sense of what is being considered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hTQEqB5y9c
After some careful consideration however, the only scenario we could come up with in which a human really needs to understand that they are not talking to a human representative, was emergency services like 911. The argument with emergency services is simply that during a crisis (shooting, heart attack…) there may be nuances (tone, slurred speech…) that a human can take from a conversation that AI’s cannot.
We are not suggesting that AI’s can not be very useful in emergency services communications (think about alerts, routing… that can all be done much faster, more accurately and more calmly by an AI than a human). We are suggesting that in real emergencies human callers should know if they are talking to an AI or another human.
Today the United States oldest gun maker Remington Outdoor Company Inc, which owns Remington Arms, filed for Bankruptcy protection. The anti-gun lobby has taken this as a sign that the guns and gun companies are finally starting to decline. Unfortunately, Remington’s collapse is only a sign of bad management and will do nothing to stem the tide of easy to find, cheap guns.
Remington expanded production several in the Obama era, especially after Sandy Hook, as Americans feared their misunderstood second amendment rights were going to be taken away, resulting in spiking gun sales. Then after the flip flopping sometimes NRA supporter Donald Trump became President, all gun manufacturers including Remington found that sales declined because there was little fear of new gun restrictions.
In 2007 high profile private equity firm Cerberus bought Remington and started loading up the debt. In the end Remington took on nearly 1 Billion (yes, that is a “B”) in debt and was stuck with huge inventories they could not sell to service that debt.
After numerous rounds of, “We don’t know if Kim Jong Un is still alive,” Kim Jong Un himself decided to send Donald Trump a letter in his own handwriting to let him know he was still in the game.
The Donald opened the letter which appeared to contain a single line of coded message, 370HSSV-0773H.
The Donald was baffled, so he e-mailed it to the Secretary of State and his aides who had no clue either, (so that’s why Rex was fired!)
So they sent it to the FBI but none could solve it.
Last week the NDP Alberta Government introduced yet another budget without any cuts in it. Instead they are relying on growth to balance the budget by 2023 leaving us with colossal debt of about $96B.
Both the previous Liberal and current NDP governments in British Columbia have been on similar spending sprees and while certainly not as deep, BC has had many similar economic problems to Alberta in recent years. Think about BC’s primary industries (Oil collapse, softwood lumber disutes…). However, in February 2018 their NDP Finance minister announced:
“Government’s direct operating debt is projected to be eliminated in 2018-19, one year earlier than forecast. This will be the first time government has been direct operating debt-free in over 40 years.”
Now that much of the dust has settled on Cambridge Analytica‘s misuse of Facebook users data the sad story can now be told. It is critical to note upfront that Facebook was not hacked and that the information that was misused was provided voluntarily by Facebook Users. The only breach Read more…
After limited debate the US Senate overwhelmingly approved a further reduction in “Dodd-Frank” banking regulations introduced in 2010 to avoid another 2008 style bank generated economic collapse.
Dodd-Frank‘s primary mechanism for doing this was to require financial institutions that were “too big to fail” to withstand stress tests. The idea being that if your bank was going to need a government bail out in the event of failure, effectively making you and me the banks insurance company, that such banks need to prove that they can withstand large economic downturns by keeping enough cash (and near cash) on hand to cover their immediate debts.
If banks pass the stress test, and ALL did in June 2017, they can issue dividends and buy back their own stock (financial engineering to raise their own stock price). If they fail, they can’t. The results and some key details are published so both the markets and individual investors know which banks are stable and which ones are not.
The principle Dodd-Frank change passed in March 2018, was to increase the threshold needed to be included in the stress test, from $50B to $250B.
Banks and other large financial institutions are not evil corporations but they are run by greedy people just like you and me. When those people are given massive incentives to bring in large amounts of income to the banks, they are likely to take risks that are absurd in retrospect, just likely they did in the 2000’s.
When the money that is risked belongs only to shareholder, employees, and board members, there is not public issue with those risks; even ‘crazy’ ones. The problem occurs when the company (bank) in question is so large that if it fails it will bring down the countries (globe’s?) economy. This is also called “systemic risk“. Such a failure cannot be allowed to occur, so governments step and transfer your tax money to those companies.
Put simply, if you are ‘too big to fail’, the public has a right to validate your stability.
While laws must be periodically updated to keep up with the products offered for sale and global political / financial environment, the problem with the March 2018 changes is that they are all reductions:
There has been much talk in the recent decade about banning disposable plastic bags. The basic argument is that consumer grade disposable single use plastic bags are the root cause widespread environmental damage but have ready alternatives, so why are will still using them?
As is often the case with political issues, there is no simple answer to the question “Should single use plastic bags be banned?”. Below are some of the facts and you can decide for yourself if this is a crisis or not:
ARGUMENTS AGAINST SINGLE USE PLASTIC BAGS
Australian scientists found that 90% of seabirds had plastic in their digestive tract
85% of ‘ocean garbage’ is plastic
In March of 2018, Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna claimed that there is the equivalent of one full dump truck load of plastic materials being dumped in the ocean every minute of every day
Plastic bags are made from non-renewable material
Single use plastic bags account cost about $.04 each to buy new and it is estimated the clean up cost is about $.15 per bag, resulting in a total cost to the consumer of more than $80 per year (more…)
Dr David Maenz, author of the new book ‘The Price of Carbon’, explains that blocking Canadian and US pipelines will simply push the supply to a different part of the world. If Americans and Canadians produce and transport our own oil & gas, those projects will need rigorous environmental validations. Read more…
Please note that www.PartisianIssues.com is trying to stay out of Municipal politics. In Chestermere’s case specifically, we know that the new Council will make mistakes but that those mistakes will be well intentioned and not malicious.
Claim: Chestermere Is In Too Much of a Hurry To Handle Its Own CAO Search:
This is perhaps the strangest claim made in the article so we will deal with it first. Our original article made three fundamental points;
Lacombe will do their CAO search much faster than Chestermere
Lacombe will do their CAO search for somewhere between $100K and $200K less than Chestermere
Temporary staff, almost by their very definition, will not develop meaningful changes
The simple fact is that even though Lacombe started their CAO search after Chesteremere did, Lacombe has already hired a new CAO. Chestermere is still spending $27,000 on a person (who we are sure is a smart, qualified but temporary CAO) that has not made any notable changes to the city that any other CAO wouldn’t have done.
Beyond this we found it odd to imply that Lacombe isn’t in a hurry to get their CAO work done. Clearly this is inaccurate; Lacombe is done and Chestermere isn’t.
Let me start with the obligatory, I do not particularly like Donald Trump, believe much of what he says or think his campaign was shinny clean. That being said I do like to listen to both facts and common sense, so let’s go:
How We Know Trump’s Campaign Did Not Collude With the Russian Government:
There are a few key points to consider when thinking about the claims that the Trump Campaign for President of the United States in 2016 was seriously aided by the Russian Government:
It has firmly been established that almost no-one in the 2016 Trump Campaign, including Donald J Trump himself, thought that he had any serious shot at winning until a few days before the election (if then!). Why would anyone intentionally collude with a foreign power unless they thought they were close to a victory? The upside is questionable and downside is massive. .
Most people assume that large scale ‘attacks’ need co-ordination. This is false, From Al Qaeda to political operatives, all that is needed for an effective campaign is a general direction. Individuals and organizations know what do without centralized organization. For example, in the US, the Koch brothers do not need to talk to the Trump or Bush campaigns to know their job is to bang on the Democrats and promote the Republicans. Russia based organizations do not need direction from the Kremlin to know what to do. . (more…)
Dr David Maenz is interviewed on CBC Regina radio. The discussion is on climate change, his new book The Price of Carbon, and how the Saskatchewan Provincial government is handling the Canadian Federal Governments demand for a price on carbon.
