Blessed by the Potato

Well, from the preliminary results here before I head off to bed, it looks like the Liberals have won with a handy majority. However, I have to wonder how many people actually voted for the Liberals, rather than against the Conservatives? How many ridings were hotly contested, and how many people would have been better represented by some degree of proportional representation?

These issues didn’t seem to trouble voters, as it looks like the referendum failed miserably. I don’t quite understand why. Yes, the education and awareness campaign was pathetic, and most people were talking about religious schools rather than electoral reform. People were writing letters to the editor every day to the local paper with misconceptions and FUD about how the list MPP system would work (and not understanding how the current system of getting your name on the ballot as a local candidate works, either), so even people interested (and irate) enough to pester the paper couldn’t (or wouldn’t) learn what it was about. And with a budget of under $7 million (something like fifty cents a person — I’d like to tell you what the parties spent on advertising, but I can’t find that figure; I know the limit is something like 70 cents per voter province-wide, plus another $1 per voter for local candidates), and a somewhat complicated/subtle/boring change to explain, it’s not too surprising that the education campaign wasn’t very effective. But at the same time, I figured people would be hungry for electoral reform, as I am most of the time. The referendum in BC was not that long ago and it was so close*. And in fact, I believe that BC is going to re-hold their referendum in 2009 (with more education campaigns, and more details fleshed out, such as the proposed boundaries of the new electoral districts).

I’m disappointed, Ontario.

* – granted, their proposed system was STV, which I personally preferred over MMP, even if it does make voting and counting more complicated.

Oh those many years ago, when Google first went public, I thought about investing in it. I was a keen user of Google, loving the slick, minimalist interface and improved search results from right from when I first used it in beta. But when the initial share price was announced at $85 or so, I balked. No way was I going to drop that kind of money on a company that didn’t have a solid revenue stream in place, especially following as it did the bust of the dot-com bubble where so many other bright-ideas-but-no-revenue companies ballooned up just to crash. I figured it was overhyped and would fall not too long after the IPO into a range that would be more appropriate, less inflated by rumour and speculation. (Also, to avoid an odd-lot-trade, a share price of $85 (US, which was expensive at the time, too), would have required buying 100 shares. While I might have believed in it enough to invest say $500 or even $1000 in Google just to see what happened in the long run, I couldn’t put down the nearly $10,000 it would take to buy a lot of 100 shares…)

Well, I was wrong. Google’s just kept going up, nearly linearly, for the last three and a half years, and is actually profitable. Someone get me a time machine!

The referendum (and election) is just a few days away, and I still haven’t seen much in the way of coverage on the referendum topic. I figured a lot of people were hungry for electoral reform, but there doesn’t seem to be much interest at all. And what I have seen worries me: there’s a lot of FUD out there about the proposed MMP system, particularly over two points. The first being the increase in the size of the legislature. People don’t want there to be more MPP’s who suckle at the taxpayer teat, especially given their propensity to vote themselves raises. However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the larger legislature will allow for more proportional representation, and will still be smaller than it was in the pre-Harris days. Ontario will still have the fewest MPPs per population of any province.

The second is the idea of list MPPs. Many people dislike the notion of a party getting to pick which MPPs get to sit in the legislature without them facing the voters individually. They fear that it will give the parties too much power, without really giving more to the voters, which is what this whole electoral reform thing is really all about. I have to admit, that was one of my concerns as well (and why I wrote the Citizen’s Assembly to recommend STV). However, it looks like Elections Ontario will get some oversight in how the lists are created, and they must be public and open. Plus, the beauty of having two votes is that if you don’t like the way a party creates its lists, but otherwise like the party and/or the local candidate, you can vote for the local candidate, but not for the cronies on the list.

There have been other concerns I’ve heard with the list system, for example that a party that can garner around 3% of the vote could get an MPP into the legislature. That might lead to crazy fringe one-issue parties: one theoretical example was what if there was a “anti-abortion” party and they got an MPP in power, and that one MPP held the balance of power and teamed up with the already batshit-crazy tories to get their twisted agenda passed. Well… there’s not much I can say to that. Unfortunately one-issue fringe parties can be an issue with proportional representation, but if 3% of Ontarians want a one-issue party to represent them, then shouldn’t they have that option? IMHO, the ability to avoid the phoney, radical majorities we do have would be worth it. An increase in minority/coalition governments might result, yes, but again that’s not necessarily such a bad thing. It would probably help moderate some of the swings we have between left and right at the moment…

So, take a look at MMP before election/referendum day. Get to know it. Hopefully you’ll see that it is an improvement over the old first-past-the-post system. If you have any other questions or concerns about it, feel free to post them here, and see www.voteformmp.ca.

Edit: One more point talked about is that MMP will lead to more unstable/ineffective minority governments, rather than the stable majorities that we tend to see today. I have a few issues with this point of view. The first is that it is not the responsibility of our electoral system to create false majorities: most Ontarians can’t agree on a single party to rule them, so we shouldn’t be getting majority governments at all. If MMP brings more minority governments, then that’s probably what Ontarians want (or, at least, all they can agree to as a whole). Also, while majority governments can pass legislation willy-nilly, without any heed to the opposition, that’s really only stable in the short term. Sure, you get 4 years of decisive leadership, but if it’s leadership you don’t want, then you vote in a new government to do things differently. Is it really stable to keep flip-flopping between Liberals, Conservatives, and the NDP? Do we really save a ton of money if we cut deeply into healthcare, fire thousands of nurses, and then just hire them back a few years later with the next regime change? A minority or coalition government may take longer to get things done because they have to deliberate more to find a consensus, but it should be more effective in the long term because the legislation they come up with should be more agreeable to all, so it won’t get shit-canned after the next election. Also, part of the reason why minority governments in our current system are so ineffective is because it’s so easy to call another election and so easy to get a majority (indeed, most of the time we get a majority legislature, even when only something like 40% of the people support the party). So rather than try to work together to get things done, the parties instead focus on braying and posturing for the next election, hoping that they’ll be able to round up a majority then. But if a party can’t reasonably expect an election call to change anything because the electoral system tends to result in minority governments, then they’ll have to buckle down and get to work.

I believe (or used to believe) in a fundamental conservation of luck, or karma, or ka, or whatever you want to call it. It’s a belief that stems partly from my physicist nature: we have a conservation law for almost everything else, so why not luck? It also helped me get through tough times, by focusing on the good things that balance it all out (or to make myself sure that they must be coming soon).

It’s this irrational belief that leads me to do silly things like buy lottery tickets after a run of bad luck, or on exam day, in the hopes that either I’d do well on the exam or win enough money that it wouldn’t matter. So after my recent run of bad luck (culminating with the break-in), I bought a lottery ticket. Well, three, to be precise. And they’ve changed the way they used to work. There used to be a small code hidden beneath the scratch-off area that wasn’t part of the game, and that code would contain some symbols that would help you see if you won or lost fairly quickly. A losing ticket had, somewhere, two characters that looked like down-pointing arrows or triangles. Winning tickets had arrows pointing up, or A’s with accents, or other characters depending on how much you won. Now there are no such clues, so I’ve been relentlessly checking these tickets to see if I missed something, hoping that the lack of “down arrows” indicates that I did win and just missed scratching somewhere. Finally, I sent Wayfare off with the ticket to the store to have them check it with the barcode reader thingy just to be absolutely sure, and she confirmed that they’ve stopped printing them with those symbols.

Oh, and speaking of the break-in, the London Police sent us a victim’s package of some sort in the mail. I haven’t had time to fully read through it yet, but it consists of a few pamphlets and a large book on how to cope with the feelings of being violated, and how to secure our home to prevent future break-ins. It’s kind of a nice touch, though I don’t think anything in there is going to be new to me.

I’ve had a Kingston USB drive with U3 for a while now, and have quite liked it. The U3 software can be a little naggy at times, and does slow down the first recognition of the drive by Windows, but the ability to carry around some programs, and most importantly, to easily password protect the whole stick appeals to me.

So when my dad decided that he didn’t want to carry his laptop back and forth with him to the cottage, and instead bought a second to leave there, he suddenly had a need for something to securely carry his data back and forth. I decided to get him a U3 thumb drive, and some kind of automated synchronization software. When I saw the SanDisk cruzer 4 GB U3 stick with “Cruzersync” I figured I had exactly what he needed. Cruzersync is billed as a synchronization program:

CruzerSync™ U3 Edition software allows SanDisk Cruzer® smart drive users to easily and securely (AES 128-bit encryption) access, edit and restore ALL their personal files (productivity documents, audio and video files, bookmarks etc.) and Outlook® data (emails, attachments, calendar, contacts, notes, tasks) at anytime from any computer in the world. A true Mobile Desktop at your fingertips!

[emphasis mine].

It turns out, though, that it’s not a synchronization program at all. It is fairly intuitive and easy to set up a “synchronization” between the computer and the stick, and once the directories to sync are set up, it will “synchronize” with just one button to find, so it’s perfect for my dad… except that it only works on one computer. You can’t really synchronize at all, instead it’s just a flashy automatic backup program. There is a mechanism for uploading files off the stick to another computer (or to your “main computer” if you accidentally delete some), but it’s no more automatic or intuitive than using the drive as a normal disk/folder and manually copying the files back and forth.

Other than that bit of bait-and-switch, it seems to be a good drive. It has a decent write speed, it’s light, and attractive (the black with orange accent light is very Halloweeny :)

With U3, there are some other providers of software, so I’m trying some other synchronization tools to see if they’ll work for my dad (they’re a bit pricey, around $30, but that’s really nothing compared to $900 for a second laptop). Otherwise, I may have to teach him how to copy his work to the U3 drive and then back to the computer, or create some kind of batch file to do that automagically.

Wayfare also recently got a new Kingston memory stick, this a 4 GB one without U3 (she just outgrew her 2 GB stick). However, it’s been frightlyfully slow, taking a good couple of seconds to save an empty Word document to the stick, and over a minute to save my thesis. Her old memory stick, also a Kingston, was at least twice as fast at transferring the very same files. Kingston tech support suggested that there might be a defect with it, and that they did have a batch go out that should be recalled due to slow speeds, but her serial number wasn’t in the range. We replaced it anyway, but the replacement is just as bad. Of course, they both came from the same Best Buy within a day or so of each other, so maybe I shouldn’t have expected any kind of improvement. I think we’re going to try exchanging it for a SanDisk next week.