Blessed by the Potato

Well, with the Canadian dollar being high there is a lot of talk in the media about buying a car in the states and importing it. There are a lot of cases where that can save you a lot of money, sometimes as much as a quarter of the cost of the car. There are all kinds of artificial trade barriers put up (so much for NAFTA) to try to prevent people from doing this. Some manufacturer’s won’t honour the warranty if a car is bought across the border. Toyota for one does honour the warranty, but makes it difficult by threatening to close down any dealers that sell to Canadians, so finding one is difficult (often, I’ve heard that finding one in a border state is nearly impossible, but if you’re willing to drive a few states further south, that there is a chance of finding a dealer who will take the chance, or not even know about the prohibition). The government also puts up a few barriers, such as making sure that the car is suitable for use in Canada, with daytime running lights, an metric instrumentation (or a sticker indicating to the driver and potential future buyers that the instruments are not metric).

Now another barrier has been put up with a recent rule about engine immobilizers. When I first heard about this, I actually thought it was a decent rule, since my car had been stolen twice. However, after seeing what thieves will do to get at cars with immobilizers I have second thoughts. Doubly so after seeing that the RIV is using the “lack” of immobilizers as a reason to prevent cars bought in the States from crossing the border. Note that these cars don’t actually lack immobilizers — the Prius system, for instance, is supposed to be nigh-impossible to start without the key or a sophisticated RF-cryptographic system. It’s just that it doesn’t have exactly the right type of immobilizer, so it can’t enter the country.

And it boggles my mind why the government would force auto makers to produce unique models for the Canadian market for things like engine immobilizers, but be unwilling to do so for emissions control (and even then it wouldn’t be different than California and the other CARB states, just the dirty states!).

Update: Another story about this in the Globe: drivers can bring their cars across the border to park them at home until this is worked out, but they can’t get them plated.

I talk a lot about risk management, and risk-benefit ratios… you’d think I was in insurance or something. Anyhow, here’s a little YouTube video on the risks of action vs inaction on global weirding that you might enjoy.

Personally, I also think that we should be taking more actions on global warming, and that the “economic risks” are vastly overstated by some. There are a large number of low-hanging fruit to grab that won’t really affect our economy much, if at all.

There were two articles in the Free Press today that I found kind of interesting, especially put together. The first was on those payday loan services, and the ridiculous annual rate that their fees work out to (over 700%).

“If we’re not there, what’s going to happen? The power is going to be cut off. The kids are not going to eat,” he told the board.

Critics scoffed at the idea, saying payday loans can often trap low income-earners in a cycle of poverty.

“They’re trading off essential things, like buying medication or paying their rent, for trying to eventually pay off their loans,” said Gloria Desorcy, head of the Manitoba branch of the Consumers Association of Canada.

“How do you ever catch up?”

The second was related to the massive sinkhole that hit downtown London on Halloween. It knocked out power for the whole day, and many people weren’t able to work in the downtown core. As a result, two guys who work in a call centre are trying to recover their lost wages for the day. I don’t really know whether these guys have a case or not, and I don’t really care (though I think it’s pretty damned ballsy to try to recover lost wages for the day spent navigating the red tape at city hall). What caught my eye was this quote:

The loss of the wages hurts, said Underhill, a father of four.

“It doesn’t seem a lot to the city,” Pinnell said. “But this bill gets cut and this bill gets cut. Everybody lives paycheque to paycheque.”

[emphasis mine]

Now, maybe this was just innocent hyperbole on the part of Pinnell, but I find that kind of disturbing nonetheless, that not only are there so many people out there living paycheque-to-paycheque, but that some people perceive that to be the norm, to be an acceptable way to carry on your life. I just couldn’t imagine not having some kind of buffer in savings or overtime options or something to make up for potential lost wages or surprise expenses. And the thought that everyone lives paycheque to paycheque makes getting ahead of the payday loan places even more difficult: how can you make sacrifices to save if you don’t even believe that saving is a virtue (or at least normal)?

Or at least it would if it happened in London with people in underwear and capes…

Luckily, I have a cool Jedi cloak and have mastered force persuasion (aka: the Jedi Mind Trick). “These aren’t the hooligans we’re looking for. Carry on.”

Well, abstract submission season is in full swing, and it looks like it’s going to be a busy summer for me, with conferences in Toronto (may), Victoria (may), San Diego (june), and Chicago (july august). At least nothing is scheduled for the other side of an ocean, or August the fall (yet). I wonder if I’ll get to stay in a hotel while in Toronto, or if they’ll make me commute (though, do I want to stay in a hotel with someone else, when I could just take the subway and sleep in my own bed?).

Right now I’m deep in the depths of rewriting fatigue. There’s a fine art to submitting the same stuff to different conferences, in rewording things to focus on different aspects of a multidisciplinary project to appeal to the audience of each conference. One, for instance, might be frequented by biologists, and so that aspect of the project should be played up, with a minimal mention of the whole MRI thing. The other one may be a conference just about MRIs, so the biology stuff serves as a background for all the cool things we’re doing with our MRI system. And of course, each one has different word counts, so sometimes things need to be exquisitely trimmed down to just the most succinct of summaries, while other times a more liberal vernacular can be applied. There’s a surprisingly large chasm of difference between a half-page 12-point font abstract, and a full-page 9-point one.

The hardest part to tweak for each is of course, the introduction, since it’s usually completely different for each submission, rather than simply (heavily) tweaked. I’m killing myself on that at the moment, just completely drawing a blank as to how to write the one I’m working on at the moment. It doesn’t help, of course, that I’ve turned my brain to mush with image analysis recently, and the increasingly psychotic effects of sleep deprivation.