A change of address…

Returning to Canada necessarily means a blog with the address of ninehoursahead and the title of Perogies and puzzled looks must die. It also means I have another set of priorities and obligations on my hands, of which first and foremost is finding a job or begging for freelance gigs.

I haven’t altogether stopped blogging however. My new gig will hopefully be more focused and probing and will continue to provide me with a reason to compulsively check my stats.

To see for yourself go here.

I said, go here.

Thanks and all the best.

Priorities, priorities priorities

I guess the Vancouver airport policy was tazer first, interpret second.

Karol Vrba told the Braidwood Inquiry into Dziekanski’s death, currently underway in Vancouver, that he was in the airport’s operation centre when a call came in about a man who only appeared to speak Russian, causing a disturbance.

Vrba, who speaks Russian, Czech, Slovak and Polish, testified on Monday that he offered to help but was told instead to check on airplanes parked at the board gates overnight, so the airport could collect fees from them.

Hope that’s scarier than zombies

If you’re depressed about not being able to do anything about global warming, you should listen to Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars series of podcasts, as recently broadcast on CBC’s ideas.

If you don’t think it’s a big deal, you should also listen to the podcasts.

If you’re looking for a good way to kill an hour or two, you should listen to the series.

If you don’t want your kids to grow up in a post-apocalyptic world or something slightly better, you should listen to the series.

Please.

Oh, the Ocean Mind series is pretty cool too. In a not-scary way.

Money, money, money

A story in Monday’s Globe and Mail life section considers the notion of financial honesty and looks at why people are reluctant to talk about money matters:

We live in a culture of money. Its power is among the first lessons we learn about the world. Those seductive, colourful toys, displayed for our pleasure and consumption, cannot be ours without money. Education is sold as a way to earn more money in better jobs. We invent verbs like “monetize” to describe how to turn every endeavour, even those we do for amusement, into profit. And yet we don’t talk about it – not easily anyway.

I think, though, the author may have missed something. You see, in my experience – and after doing research for an article for This Magazine – talking about money seems very much a generational thing. From an article I wrote for This Magazine (that’s what the magazine is called) last year:

University of British Columbia business professor Nancy Langton, meanwhile, sees young workers’ willingness to talk about income as part of a trend toward greater openness, something that social networking websites such as Facebook have facilitated.

“I think people in their 40s and older were raised to be somewhat more private and discreet,” she explains. “We see much less emphasis by today’s teens and twentysomethings on protecting privacy.”

London snowing

Looks like if you want a good snowstorm – something better than the pansy centimeter at a time to be melted two days later that we get here – you need to go to…. drumroll please…… LONDON?

The Super Bowl of television (that would be the Super Bowl)

I’m not the only one to link to the following story today, but it is too timely and too interesting, considering everyone watching the game is intimately familiar with the work of sports television producers. Yet, we are also unfamiliar with the process, which makes this article so interesting.

If the production crew of a televised football game is like a symphony orchestra, Bob Fishman is its conductor. He sits front and center in the dark trailer, insulated from the sunshine and the roar of the crowd, taking the fragments of sounds and moving images and assembling the broadcast on the fly, mediating the real event into the digital one. He scans the dizzying bank of screens to select the next shot, and the next, and the next, layering in replays, graphics, and sound, barking his orders via headset to his crew, plugging into a rhythm that echoes the pulse of the game.

True north strong and (relatively) nuclear apocalypse free

One day, possibly, Canada will become the new chosen land; the place humans flock to find safety and a stable living environment. They may not even care about the cold.

At least that’s the conclusion Guardian journalist Tanya Gold came to after several days spent trying to survive a hypothetical apocalypse in Britain. Britain!

Still, I would hate to deprive you of the entertaining article, in which the urbanite Gold rips the head off a pheasant. Now that’s entertainment!

I am (vaguely) confident I will not starve. But there is one other thing I am sweating over: nuclear power stations. Professor Alan Weisman wrote The World Without Us, a description of what he believes would happen to Earth if we all vanished. I call him. He says I am right to worry. Why? Because most nuclear plants are water-cooled. Water, he explains, in a dry, calm voice, needs to circulate around the reactors, or they will explode. If there were no humans to operate it, the plant would shut down automatically, and the water would be cooled with diesel fuel. For about a week. Then the heat from the reactor would evaporate and expose the core. “It will either melt down or burst into very radioactive flames,” he says. So what would you do, Professor Weisman? “I would probably go to Canada,” he says. “There aren’t many nuclear power stations in Canada.”

Value Miasto

An interesting story on the rise of Value Village-like stores in Poland from the New York Times:

At 9 a.m. on a recent December day, several dozen shoppers all hurled themselves at the door of a second-hand clothes store here, like a rugby scrum hitting a wall. Those stuck outside could only watch as a surprising mix of young hipsters and graying retirees sprinted upstairs, first to where the fur and leather coats awaited.

In a scene repeated daily, whenever the latest delivery has landed, the battle was on for the best finds at the store, called Tomitex, where everything, including the fur, sells for roughly $7 a pound the first week after delivery and as low as 75 cents thereafter.

But this is not a tale of people buying used clothes in the midst of recessionary gloom. The global economic crisis has yet to hit a majority of Poles.

Kinda like ____ salespeople

Among the comments from Gao Xiginq, who runs the China Investment Corporation during an interview with James Fallows:

About Wall Street jobs, wealth, and the cultural distortion of America:

I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money. And this is not right.

When I graduated from Duke [in 1986], as a first-year lawyer, I got $60,000. I thought it was astronomical! I was making somewhere a bit more than $80,000 when I came back to China in 1988. And that first month’s salary I got in China, on a little slip of paper, was 59 yuan. A few dollars! With a few yuan deducted for my rent and my water bill. I laughed when I saw it: 59 yuan!

The thing is, we are working as hard as, if not harder than, those people. And we’re not stupid. Today those people fresh out of law school would get $130,000, or $150,000. It doesn’t sound right.

Individually, everyone needs to be compensated. But collectively, this directs the resources of the country. It distorts the talents of the country. The best and brightest minds go to lawyering, go to M.B.A.s. And that affects our country, too! Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, “Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school.” I say, “Why? Why not science and engineering?” They say, “Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money.” So you have all these clever people going into financial engineering, where they come up with all these complicated products to sell to people.

Like it, love it, question it…

I like this story, about a 73-year old college basketball player. Short and sweet.

Before Sunday’s basketball game, Coach Yogi Woods gathered the junior varsity at Lambuth University. Watch out for 73 on the other team, he said. He did not mean the player’s number. He meant his age.

The visitors, Roane State Community College, had a septuagenarian guard, Ken Mink, college basketball’s oldest player, who has started a second career after his first ended a half century ago with a mysterious shaving-cream incident.

If the 6-foot Mink was good enough to play, he was good enough to be guarded, Woods told the Lambuth players. Then he turned to the freshman Kendrick Coleman and said: “If he goes in for a layup, don’t let him have it. If he scores on you, we will never let you forget it.”

I love this story, about ads on buses that don’t get too holy.

Perhaps you’ve enjoyed the recent run of advertising duels between some of America’s biggest brands — Mac v. PC, Dunkin’ Donuts v. Starbucks. Burger King v. McWorld.

And now, coming to the broad side of a bus near you, God vs. No God.

But Ross Perot, has me wondering, where does it stop. (Bold italics, mine)

How will you respond if Obama puts through the tax increase he has promised, particularly with respect to the capital gains tax increase he has promised?

President-elect Obama appears to be leaning toward a delay in his tax increases for the wealthiest 5 percent to pay for his promised tax cuts for the remaining 95 percent. History has shown that raising taxes in a recession tends to worsen the situation. We would encourage him to delay his proposed increases and implement his proposed tax cuts. We ascribe to the theory that tax cuts boost the economy — and therefore increase total tax receipts — no matter which portion of the tax-paying public receives the tax cuts.

A theory, though, is something that holds true across a range of variables. But, and you don’t have to be a genius to see this, you can only cut taxes so far. To zero, to be exact. And at that point, total tax receipts do not rise, they fall to zero as well. Even at one-per-cent tax, the economy would need to be a lot better than forty times that of today for tax receipts to keep rising. So his whole point is wrong. Unfortunately, it’s a widely held belief.