The Classic Example of Amtrak

They may not say it, but through their actions it's clear that plenty of people think history is unimportant; "bunk," as Henry Ford said in 1916. As the holder of a degree in history, I'm kind of sensitive about that. Particularly if you're someone in a position of authority, or want to be in a position of authority, either a knowledge of history or access to a staff that includes people who are knowledgeable about history is essential. Why? Because it helps prevent you making grand, bold statements about how to change and improve things, when those "changes and improvements" have already been tried and, generally, failed.

Yesterday, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney - incidentally, my preference would be that Romney gets the nomination, if for no other reason than among the likely victors, Romney seems like he would do the least damage to the United States in the event of a Republican win in 2012 - suggested in an op-ed in the New Hampshire Union Leader* that one way to cut down on government spending would be to privatize Amtrak, the United States' government-owned national passenger rail system, describing it as "a classic example" of one of the services "that the private sector can perform better than the public sector."

It reminds me of whispers during and after the Toronto mayoral election last year about potential privatization of the Toronto Transit Commission, the city's public transit operator. The same arguments were trotted out, that a private operator would run more efficiently and conduct itself with an eye toward customer service and so on, and that everyone would be better off if the ways to get around were owned and run by organizations with profit as the first goal.

But would it really?

An Amtrak California Capitol Corridor train in Oakland, California.

When it comes to transit operators, Amtrak is actually fairly recent - it's only forty years old. Its establishment in 1971 was essentially a last-ditch effort on the part of the US government to save the passenger rail system from oblivion. With the construction of the Interstate Highway System after the Second World War and the new availability of passenger air travel, rail had difficulty competing in a market that it had once dominated through sheer lack of alternatives. At that time, all passenger rail in the US was provided by private companies, and since they were hemorrhaging money thanks to ever-smaller passenger numbers, they did what made sense for them: either terminating their passenger services, or going bankrupt. Amtrak was a "last hurrah," an experiment in tying together as many privately-owned passenger routes as possible under public ownership, and it wasn't expected to last.

Yet it did.

Government operation has kept passenger rail alive, if not necessarily vital, in the United States since 1971, and as culture continues to shift and air travel becomes more and more frustrating, rail may be bound for a renaissance. So the solution is... to privatize it? Is that the government's job - to be a caretaker? Does it really make sense for the government to run preferred but uneconomic services in times when a profit can't be made from it, but as soon as a profit can be made, control should be given up to private companies - with the revenues not coming as dividends to the government that supported it in the lean times with tax dollars, but to new owners just looking for profit?

No! What all governments everywhere need is a source of revenue, and more often than not, that comes in the form of taxation. Yet the people who raise a hue and cry about high taxation are frequently the very same people who advocate selling off profitable or potentially-profitable national assets. It's really very simple - the more assets that the United States government owns that make more money than they cost to run, the less taxes it needs to levy in order to maintain its operations.

There are things more important than the profit motive.

*As of this writing, Romney's op-ed does not seem to appear on the Union Leader's website. I was greeted with a big Ron Paul banner ad, though.

Photo: GO Home

Back in the summer of 2009, I was at Milton GO Station when one of the afternoon trains came in from Toronto. Before a GO Transit attendant told me to stop taking pictures for vague "security" reasons - even though there is nothing on their website restricting non-commercial photography - I was able to snap a few shots of the commuters emerging into the June rain to wash off the dirt of the day.

Incidentally, when I was told to stop taking photos, there weren't even any trains in the station; I'd been taking a photo of the station's bike storage facility, a bus-stop like enclosure with a bike symbol on top.

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Politeness and the Gun

"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life."
- Robert A. Heinlein, "Beyond This Horizon," 1942

It's not hard to find permutations of this quote now. Particularly in the United States, the idea of ordinary people carrying guns for protection is an idea that was forged in the Revolution and advanced by the frontier that it expanded into through the nineteenth century. Today, the United States is probably one of the most well-armed societies on Earth; only in Illinois is it illegal to carry a firearm, and the majority of states allow firearms to be carried openly. Now, it's not as if every single American is packing - during the course of my journeys down to the States, the closest I came was a sign on a Valley Metro bus in Tempe, Arizona that helpfully told me firearms were prohibited onboard.

I'm not interested in talking about openly carrying firearms itself; that's an intensely charged discussion that I don't really have any reason to enter. It's more the psychology behind them, the psychology that is the source of the Heinlein quote at the top of this post. The idea that a proliferation of weapons will lead to a proliferation of manners - a sort of mutually assured destruction for society, perhaps.

Whether or not this would work in the ideal way some of its supporters suggest isn't up for me to figure out. It's just something I've been thinking about, and was recently reminded of - and I can't get beyond the conclusion that a society based on the manners of the gun would be profoundly... off.

A society based on the manners of the Nintendo Zapper, on the other hand, would be profoundly entertained!

Strip away the rhetoric about self-protection, about manners, and so on, and what do you get? That probably depends significantly on the views you bring to the table, but for me, it looks like a society based on fear. A society where you need to be on your best behavior at all times, lest your neighbor decides you're offensive and decides to shoot you - though I know that's a rather extreme possibility. But it really does remind me of the way many people seem to approach religion, particularly Old Testament-flavored Christianity, where the core of the belief is fear: fear of God, fear of Hell, fear of punishment. I hear anecdotal stories occasionally about people who claim that their belief in a vengeful God and eternal punishment is all that keeps them from commiting bloody crimes and atrocities on Earth.

That theoretical "armed, polite society" seems like it hews the same way; that it's set up to keep those same people in line, the people who would run wild with reckless abandon if they knew that the person next to them on the bus, or for that matter barely anyone, could kill them if they stepped far enough out of line.

But what kind of foundation is that? "Follow social norms, lest your peers kill you?" Honestly, I feel as if this goes even farther than states - states may govern through a monopoly on force, but force does not have to be death-dealing. Doesn't it say something about a society if it's necessary for people to be armed to make it polite, that there's been some problem somewhere down the line? The more I think about it, the more it seems like a society founded on fear... and societies based on fear never last. Either people stop being scared, or the fear deepens into bunker mentalities.

If a man can only be well-mannered when he believes his life is on the line... is that really the sort of man we want to be unfettered in society?

Photo: Wings From the Jet Age

From Mad Men to Pan Am, it seems like the '60s are becoming cool again. I can understand why; even though it was a highly unpleasant time for vast swathes of society, the age also carried with it a transformative, optimistic culture that is dearly, sorely needed in this overcast twenty-first century. Looking back, it's easy to see the Jet Age as a time that was polished, refined, and poised on the edge of everything: a time when everything was possible.

The Boeing 707 was the jet of the Jet Age. It was on such a jet that my grandfather and immediate family first came to Canada in that long, hot summer of 1969. They flew BOAC, the British Overseas Airways Corporation, one of two airlines that was merged to form British Airways in 1974. We still have the original paper ticket from that flight forty-two years ago, so I can say that as of July 15, 1969, a round-trip flight from Manchester to Toronto - with a stopover in Montreal on both legs - cost $340.00; that works out to $2,092.04 in 2011 dollars. Today, the same round-trip ticket costs $1,113; of course, that's without any taxes, and it's also for one person. I guess the Jet Age may have been a bit cheaper after all.

Photographed is a BOAC 707 on the ground at Toronto International Airport on August 18, 1969.

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Whither the Vancouver Downtown Streetcar?

Despite appearances, Vancouver is no stranger to streetcars. The tracks of the old interurban line that connected it to New Westminster, paralleled now by the SkyTrain, are still visible here and there in various states of decay, and on Frances Street in East Van there's still a lane of cobblestones where, I'm told, the streetcar once went down. Still, the wave of streetcar abandonment didn't break until after it swept across the Lower Mainland, and while the modern trolley system is a spiritual successor of sorts, the city has grown up without them.

As the Vancouver municipal election heats up, Suzanne Anton's Non-Partisan Association is looking to change that. The last time I passed by the NPA's campaign headquarters in the underground mall leading to Granville Station, I stopped dead in my tracks; stopped because I wanted to make sure that what I was seeing, a proposed map of the first stage of the Vancouver Downtown Streetcar, was actually there. Last Wednesday, Anton announced that one of her goals as Mayor of Vancouver would be to bring the streetcar back to Vancouver, extending the heritage line that now runs between Granville Island and Olympic Village via Chinatown, all the way to Waterfront Station.

Though I imagine they'd use modern cars for the extension.

Not that I actually expect it to happen; the city didn't waste much time throwing cold water on the plan, pointing out that transportation planning is properly TransLink's bailiwick, not the City of Vancouver's - and in that respect it's interesting the NPA would want to spend Vancouver city dollars on something that would be handled by the regional agency, when you consider that the NPA campaign office has a sign in the window counting up the debt - I think - accrued by Mayor Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver. As TransLink has other things to focus its attention on at the moment - the Evergreen Line, the Millennium Line's Broadway extension, the question of more comprehensive rapid transit in Surrey - the Vancouver Downtown Streetcar would likely fall by the wayside anyway.

As much as I'd like to see steps being made toward the reinstallation of a streetcar system in Vancouver, the fact remains that the area that would be served by it already has fairly comprehensive transit that could, for now, likely be addressed by additional buses. I'd much rather see transportation funds going to establish new, reliable transit links in communities that lack them. If serious work is done on a Vancouver downtown streetcar, it should be because the passenger load is too large for the bus system to adequately move, and not because the government thinks that streetcars are keen.

I'll grant that there's something of a streetcar renaissance going on in the United States now, galvanized by the ten-year success of the Portland Streetcar; Cincinnati, Ohio is building a system meant to help revitalize its downtown core, and I heard today that Indianapolis has recently been investigating the prospect itself. Yet the challenges that many American cities face are not the same ones that Vancouver is staring at. If there's an opportunity and a driving reason to lay the tracks in the ground, I say go ahead - but the most important thing should be that some other part of Metro Vancouver does not go without so we can have another set of rails around False Creek.

Photo: EdgeWalkin'

After I landed in Toronto, I realized that the CN Tower had changed a bit since the last time I was in the city; there's a supporting framework on the top of the SkyPod now. This is part of EdgeWalk, a new attraction that allows you to walk around the circumference of the tower, outside. When I took this photo from College Street just east of Bathurst I just thought I was getting a good angle on the tower - I didn't expect to capture four people in the middle of an EdgeWalk, but if you look close you can see the figures clear as day.

Would I take an EdgeWalk the next time I'm in Toronto, or ever? Hard question - aside from the sheer issues of the whole "walking around on a building edge a thousand feet up," there's also a lot of other stuff that the $175 ticket could potentially buy.

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A Calendar for the Moon of 55 Cancri f

A while ago I was making plans to write stories in the world of Esperanza, a fictional habitable moon of 55 Cancri f, a gas giant that's known to orbit within the habitable zone of its star. I made a fair amount of early progress before I discovered more detailed plots of f's orbit that demonstrated its orbit was a bit more eccentric than I'd thought; that the planet spends roughly a quarter of its orbit inside the habitable zone.

If it had been otherwise, if the orbit had wandered out of the HZ for a spell, that'd be different; it's easy to retain heat, but it's a bit more difficult to get rid of it, and while the limited calculations I did indicated that it wasn't out of the question for liquid water to exist on one of f's moons no matter what the nature of the planet's orbit, that moon would be way too torrid for humans - the numbers I found were in the neighborhood of 70 or 80 degrees Celsius, though I freely admit there's every possibility that I screwed up the math and the real situation is entirely different. I am, after all, a dude that very nearly failed Grade 10 General Math.

Before I found these things out, though, I'd put together a calendar, after the Coyote series demonstrated the need for one. Since planets don't tend to share orbits, it's unlikely I'll be able to use it as I've put it together, except for some built-to-specs fictional planet. So here it is.

The Calendar of 55 Cancri f-I (Esperanza)

While the telescopes we have are sensitive as hell, and have to be in order to detect all these exoplanets, there's still room for uncertainty. To my knowledge, 55 Cancri f's orbital period still isn't exactly known; but Wikipedia cites a 2007 article that makes it 260 days, plus or minus 1.1, so I just split it down the middle and gave it a 260-day long year. That's one of the things I liked about it; a lot of other planets seem to have years that are longer than Earth, so it felt fresh and new for the years to go by quickly.

The moon, Esparanza, has its own day; it's not tidally locked to the gas giant for valid reasons that are irrelevant here. That day is thirty-eight hours long, which makes the local year 164.2 E-days in length, with the decimal resulting in there being an extra 7 hours and 36 minutes left over at the end of the year. Originally I'd planned to have them constitute a "short day" after the last regular day of the year, but I didn't think that would work; it seemed to me it would make the sunrise and sunset times gradually drift.

Esparanza orbited 55 Cancri f with a semimajor axis of roughly 1.6 million kilometers (I'm working off of memory with this point, but hopefully the number is accurate), making one orbit in 15.7 days. This worked out well for making the standard month sixteen days long. There are nine months on Esparanza, which I named after the Muses of Greek mythology plus one: Mnemosyne, Polyhymnia, Erato, Clio, Thalia, Terpsichore, Euterpe, Melpomene, and Urania. Mnemosyne is a twenty-day month; all the others have sixteen days. New Year's Day, Mnemosyne 1st, is Esparanza's northern hemisphere Winter Solstice.

Yet there's still the issue of those leftover hours and minutes at the end of the year. After a bit the solution was obvious - just use a leap year. After five years, enough spare time has piled up at the end of the year to be worth a day in itself; this day occurs on Terpsichore 17th, and in accordance with the Law of Fives, it is called St. Tib's Day.

There are four days of the week, with names derived from the classical Japanese elements: Tsuchiday, Hiday, Kazeday, and Mizuday.

So here's what a page of a calendar would look like:

T	H	K	M
1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16

In-setting, the Esparanza calendar began with its original discovery from Earth in 2042, which allowed me to calculate backwards to determine the importation of holidays. Figuring out the date that, say, Christmas or Easter would fall on is an issue for people more focused on calendrical affairs, though now that I think about it that could make an interesting background for a short - I went with something simpler, and figured out the date on which Esparanzans would celebrate X-Day.

Fairly simple - X-Day, the prophesied end of the world at the hands of the alien X-ists and Sex Goddesses, happened on July 5, 1998. (What, don't you remember?) Converting the Earth and Esparanza years into hours, I worked backward and found that July 5, 1998 and March 17, 2042 - this latter date being Mnemosyne 1st, O AS (Anno Spes, as "spes" and "esparanza" both mean "hope") - were separated by exactly 383,064 hours, going from midnight to midnight. Thus, July 5, 1998 worked out to Clio 12th, -61 AS, and I had a yearly Esparanzan date for X-Day. Truly an important holiday to pin down.

Then science came and wrecked it all up, and I packed up for some new star system. Still - I like the way this one was starting to come together.

Photo: Ground Level 'L'

This time last year we'd briefly stopped in Chicago, one of the last familiar places on the long road to British Columbia. I'd wanted to hop on the 'L' for old time's sake while I was there, but there wasn't enough time; the closest I came was on the Dan Ryan Expressway, when we passed by a presumably-northbound Red Line train stopped at 47th Station with eight of those good old 3200 series cars. I find it a bit odd that the nameplates are double-sided in this instance - I mean, is the average motorist really paying attention to that kind of information?

Also, pardon the dark blue at the top of the photo; it's an occupational hazard when you're taking pictures through a windshield.


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They Have A Strange Definition of "Internal"

It's times like these that make me glad that my family hasn't had anything to do with the United States since my ancestors left/were kicked out of (the history is not crystal clear) New York state after the Revolution. Over the past few months, news has been bubbling up in the broadsheets here regarding a tightening of loopholes in US tax law and the hardening of requirements for American citizens living abroad to file their taxes. August 31st marked the deadline for Americans in Canada to send their returns to the IRS.

That's right; if you're the holder of an American passport, you're legally obligated to file a tax return with the Internal Revenue Service every year, regardless of whether or not you live or work or make any money whatsoever in the United States. This stands in opposition to the tax practices of... well, every other country on Earth except Eritrea. If you're Canadian and living abroad, unless you have revenue coming in from Canadian sources, you have no obligation to pay income taxes.

This is a bit of a problem for the many, many dual citizens or expatriate Americans who are living in Canada - in 2006 there were over three hundred thousand American-Canadians reported, and estimates of American part-time residents and landed immigrants up here go as high as two million. For some of these "American-Canadians," American citizenship - which is acquired at birth if you're born in the United States or certain territories subject to its authority, or if your parents are citizens - is a legal quirk at best, something irrelevant to their daily lives.

There's more to citizenship than the legal aspects - citizenship is a state of mind. Is a "citizen" who carries another country's passport, has lived in that country for 99% or more of their life, and who has spent every working day in that country really a citizen in anything more than a legal term? Well, yes. That's why these legal issues crop up so often. That doesn't mean it's just, though. A recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times has something to say about that.

Now, some might say that this is their own fault - that American-Canadians like, say, Margaret Wente should have known that moving to Canada as a teenager and getting citizenship as a young adult doesn't nullify duties to the US. Some might say something like, "Ignorance is no excuse. It was their responsibility to know the laws that affected them and follow them. If they don't like it they can give up their American citizenship."

Yeah, about that...

Look at all these sweet, sweet United States dollars. The IRS wants these, oh yes they do. Good thing I have no obligation to them.

The process of renouncing United States citizenship is fairly simple, but the State Department website is specific that a citizen's renunciation "may have no effect whatsoever on his or her U.S. tax or military service obligations," so there are no guarantees that a renunciation would get the IRS off an ex-citizen's back. What makes that note even better is that it comes only two paragraphs after the explanation that anyone who renounces American citizenship can no longer enjoy any of the rights and privileges that come with that citizenship, "as this would be logically inconsistent with the concept of renunciation."

Yet the rabbit hole goes even deeper than that! In the right circumstances, you don't even have to be an American at all to have an obligation to the IRS. I pulled this straight from their website:

• A nonresident alien individual engaged or considered to be engaged in a trade or business in the United States during the year. You must file even if:
  
  • Your income did not come from a trade or business conducted in the United States,
    
  • You have no income from U.S. sources, or
    
  • Your income is exempt from income tax.

So even if you don't live in the United States, even if you're not a citizen of the United States, the IRS still reserves the authority to extract revenue from you despite your externality. Incredible, isn't it? This goes out the window if "U.S. source income is wages in an amount less than the personal exemption amount" - but in keeping with the byzantine nature of the IRS that I have absorbed osmotically through decades of exposure to American culture, I cannot actually determine what this amount is.

I understand the basic intent of the law - as well they should, the US government wants to stop wealthy Americans and corporations from hiding their income in tax havens and thus acting as financial parasites. But this is a long dragnet, and the people it's intended to catch will also have the most resources to escape it; it's people like everyday American-Canadians, the people it wasn't intended to catch, that will have to deal with the worst of it - all for a country they left behind. A lot of these people wouldn't even owe taxes to the IRS at all; the problem is more that they did not file tax returns.

To me, it's arrogance. People who do not live in a country, who do not personally profit from the services of that country, should not be responsible for paying the general costs of that country even if they're a citizen. I could understand if the US wanted to levy, say, a "consular tax" on their expatriate citizens, because such consular services are the only ones they would use; say, if they need to be evacuated from some kind of trouble spot. The only real niggle in this is the issue of expatriate voting - not something I'm going to address at the moment, though I recognize it is an issue. But responsibilities and privileges should go both ways.

Photo: Mount Baker Between

As the plane approached Vancouver International Airport, it was clear that the Lower Mainland was once again under a cloudy ceiling - enough so that there were multiple layers of it. Still, that didn't mean I couldn't see anything. During its descent the plane spent some time in a clear patch of sky between two cloud layers, and while the tips of mountains pierced the bottom here and there, the volcanic Mount Baker in Washington State towered above them all.


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Keep Metro Vancouver's Cities Free

It's simple: people like building things. Creation is one of the central drives of humanity, and it's a good thing too, because otherwise nothing would ever get built. We take sand and rocks and wood and we build cities. The problem arises when people put those acts of creation on a pedestal; when the creation becomes the most important thing, without sparing a thought for the consequences of that creation - whether or not the thing would have been better left unbuilt.

These days, we don't see many new cities rising up out of nothing; where "new" cities appear, it's usually through old ones. The pattern stretches back centuries; Vancouver didn't always have its modern borders, after all. Yet for the past ten years, Metro Vancouver has been the largest metropolitan area in Canada that has not experienced - or, more to the point, been forced into - municipal amalgamation. Yesterday, through Tenth to the Fraser, I found a week-old but still disturbing article on Vancity Buzz proposing the "consolidation" of Metro Vancouver - that is, the awkward shoving-together of the independent cities of this part of the Lower Mainland in the name of "efficiency," or to create more pleasing maps.

"When tourists fly into Vancouver, the first ground they touch is Richmond, not Vancouver. And when tourists want to experience the beautiful outdoors they visit the North Shore, not Vancouver," writes Vancity Buzz's Token White Guy. "Consolidate interconnected municipalities and redraw boundaries. Such reorganization will allow for more use of shared resources and reduce the inefficiency of having so many municipal governments."

I had no idea that it was so hard on tourists to cross so many invisible municipal borders. Please, won't someone think of the tourists? While we're at it, who needs independent municipalities capable of paying close attention to their citizens and dealing with local problems when we could run the whole show from Cambie and Broadway?

Even better - amalgamation would simplify transportation... transportation that's handled by the same regional entity anyway, but let's not think about that for a second! New Westminster would have its not-elaborated-upon "transit issues" resolved by amalgamating with Vancouver and Burnaby - perhaps this is meant to mean the shelved United Boulevard extension that New Westminster didn't want anyway - while Burnaby "will benefit by gaining downtown New Westminster and gain a promising tourist face." Because why should Burnaby develop its own downtown or tourist face when it can just piggyback off a city that did?

Am I in favor of this? Short answer: no. Long answer: nooooooooooooooooooo!

This is where New West starts, and don't you be forgetting it.

Let me just say that I can understand some Vancouverites, specifically long-term Vancouverites who haven't lived in another major city, talking seriously about amalgamation. It's an intellectual exercise to them; they've never lived through it. They only know about it on paper. Me, though, I'm from Toronto. Even if I wasn't living within its borders on January 1, 1998, I am well aware of what it was like when the six cities of Metropolitan Toronto were dismantled - despite a non-binding referendum in which 70% came down against amalgamation - to form the present megacity, and what happened afterward. Witness also the example of Montreal, where the twenty-seven cities of Montreal Island were forcibly amalgamated by provincial fiat; when the Quebec Liberals came to power in 2003, they gave those former cities the chance to hold de-amalgamation referenda; of the twenty-two that did, fifteen bolted and are now independent once again.

I have no reason to suspect that the experience would be much different in Metro Vancouver. Different cities need different things, and people in different places have different priorities. I'm pretty sure that an amalgamation into Vancouver would be seen by many people in the outer cities as a way for Vancouver's "downtown elites" to impose their bike lanes and their ways of thinking onto their communities; it's arguable that this sort of thought, and the pushback against it, was one of the factors that allowed Rob Ford to win the mayoralty of Toronto last year on a solid base of ex-suburban support. Had Metropolitan Toronto endured, Rob Ford might have made a fine mayor of Etobicoke - but he also would not have been in the position to demolish the planned Transit City LRT network, or work on closing libraries from one end of Metro to the other, and so on.

The experience of Toronto, particularly over the last year, demonstrates that the more authority is consolidated and concentrated, the more power an individual has to reshape the subject of that authority. Independent municipalities are a natural bulwark against that. The city government of New Westminster can work toward what it considers to be good for New Westminster; but if it isn't, at least the spillover effects are minimal beyond New Westminster. Checks and balances are important in government - in my mind, it should be an extraordinary situation if we're thinking about removing them.

Practically as an afterthought, the writer suggests that another option is expanding Metro Vancouver's power by giving it control of things like policing and transit operations... which would, effectively, make it into what Metropolitan Toronto was before the amalgamation. This would make a lot more sense. We already have a regional transit provider in the form of TransLink; I wouldn't be surprised to see a Metropolitan Vancouver Police Department in some future time. Things like policing and transit, these are issues that transcend city boundaries, and in a highly-urbanized area like Metro Vancouver, it makes sense for them to be dealt with in a regional way.

That doesn't mean we should only focus on regional matters. There are very good reasons to think locally, to govern locally. A local government is far more responsive to local issues; a single government, especially when perceived as being geographically or culturally remote, leads to social friction.

Municipal amalgamation is a subject that should be approached very carefully. In an ideal world, no amalgamation would go ahead without the citizens of the cities involved voting in favor, preferably strongly in favor. However, if a future amalgamation of Vancouver presents itself in the same manner as in Toronto and Montreal, it won't matter what we think. In both circumstances, the amalgamations were pushed through by the respective provincial governments without regard for the opinions of the people affected by the reorganization.

People pushing amalgamations often say they're chasing efficiencies. Yet life is more than just a well-oiled machine.

Photo: Peering Out the Subway Hole

The Toronto subway isn't all underground - first off, nobody tell Rob Ford; if he finds out he may decide it's part of the war on the car and start making plans to tear it up. Though most of the surface-running segments are in Etobicoke, North York, and Scarborough, there's a small bit in Toronto itself between Bloor Station and Summerhill Station where you can watch the trains without those tunnels getting in the way.

From the bridge that carries Roxborough Street East over the trench the subway runs in, you can see straight into Rosedale Station. Here, I caught a northbound Yonge-University-Spadina train (you know, as opposed to all those Sheppard trains that run on the Yonge-University-Spadina line) during its brief stop there; the station's not used much, and it's rare if trains loiter for as long as ten seconds at the platform.

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A Tale of Two Taxes

What a difference a couple thousand miles of ocean can make.

Taxes have always been a delicate subject in the United States. If you're a rich person in the United States your taxes have been falling for a while, from a postwar high of 92% on the $250,001 bracket in 1952, the rates started falling precipitously under Reagan and Bush and now stand at 33%; not quite as low as the 1920s, but give them time. Now President Obama is preparing to announce a new "Buffett tax" tomorrow, and though only limited details have so far made their way to the wild, expectations are that it's going to be levied on those making more than a million dollars a year in order to help close the United States' staggering budget gap. Cuts and cuts and more cuts can only go so far without new revenue.

Predictably the Republicans, the party of all those "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," are already drawing their lines of battle against it. The first shot across the bow was the accusation that it's "class warfare" - because, really, asking those with extraordinary means to pay into the society that enabled them to realize those means is functionally identical to the proletariat laying siege to the gated communities of the bourgeoisie - followed up by claims from House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan that "it punishes job creation and those people who create jobs."

I can see it now, those wealthy job creators sitting in their offices, going over the numbers and coming to the sobering conclusion that they can't afford to install granite countertops in their vacation home in the Hamptons. Obviously there's only one rational response - create jobs in countries that don't "punish" job creation... just like they've been doing for decades. Obama's going to have a brutal fight on his hands to get a tax like this to his desk without it being so watered down you could wipe the ink off the bill with a sponge; but it seems that Republicans are committed to ensuring that the weight of taxes settle disproportionately on those who have the least resources.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg - junior partner in the ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government - has been giving whatever assurances he can that the 50p tax rate - that is, a 50% tax rate on those bringing in more than £150,000, the wealthiest 300,000 out of the UK's twenty-nine million taxpayers. When it was introduced in 2010, it was expected to raise £2.4 billion in the first year; and with the Eurozone in peril, every quid matters. Though critics originally, and still, are concerned that the tax isn't effective - though we won't know one way or another until the spring, when the Treasury will release its results - Clegg has said that it wouldn't be "morally or economically right" to end the tax unless it's replaced by a different one that further reduces the weight of taxation on Britain's poorest.

So far as I know, nothing official has been heard thus far for what the Government will do if the 50p tax turns out to be a damp squib. Nevertheless, there's been speculation that it would be replaced by a 1% tax on homes valued in excess of £2 million, less tax relief on pensions, and so on. So, you know, alternatives.

This stands in stark contrast to the proposed solutions from the peanut gallery in Washington. Sometime I have to wonder if George Bush's "read my lips: no new taxes" was not a political statement but some kind of ritual ensorcellment that binds Republicans to that commitment unless the spell is broken.

In this case, the difference between the United Kingdom and the United States appears to be one of rationalism versus emotionalism. The senior partners in the present UK government are conservatives, but they're still willing to tax those who can afford it while working toward bettering the lot of society itself. In the United States, anyone who wants to raise taxes on the wealthy has to hack through a jungle of "fuck you, got mine," and society is left to fend for itself.

Photo: Mill Pond, Mirror of Sunset

The town of Milton, Ontario gets its name from the lumber mill that was built there almost two hundred years ago now. The mill itself may not be there anymore, but the pond that was created to power it - Mill Pond - remains, and today it's one of the centerpieces of downtown Milton with trees and parkland maintained all around. I was there last week, perhaps fifteen minutes before sunset, and the way the light played against the clouds and reflected into the pond like it was a perfect mirror... it's the sort of thing I don't see often. The sort of thing you'd expect to see on the front cover of a tourism brochure.

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Flinging a Rocket Into the Future

I was high in the sky when I first heard about NASA's new rocket, flipping through the channels on WestJet's seatback satellite television to see if anything good was on or if I should just go back to Coyote Rising. Still, after the floundering that came after President Obama's cancellation of the Constellation program in 2010, which was supposed to have returned people to the moon in 2018, it's refreshing to see that in the Space Launch System, NASA once again has a direction, something to strive for.

Nevertheless, I've heard rumbles. Rumbles that it's too expensive, that it's a waste of money that would be better spent on Earth - it is a little-known secret that the liquid fuel of rockets is actually a superchilled slurry of $100 bills, and the electronics packages of satellites are just wads of old fives - that with millions of Americans unemployed and the world staring down the barrel of a renewed depression, space is something that we just can't afford. That it's time to hunker down, close the shutters, and nail down what we can while we wait for the storm to pass - and then once the skies clear, we can see what's still standing, and only then figure out whether the winds are good for throwing ourselves back into space... until the next storm comes, that is.

I disagree.

While I think that NASA would be better off getting out of the space truck business sooner rather than later, using launchers built to spec by private industry now that there is such a thing as a private space industry rather than doing that grunt work itself, for the moment new NASA projects are valuable. Whether it's a new rocket, a cutting-edge space telescope, or just another perspective on our place in the universe, the things that NASA provides have a vitality that no other government program can hope to match. NASA gives us things that are uplifting, that take us away from the dirt beneath our feet and allow us to feel the solar wind in our hair.

I don't buy the argument that the United States can't afford to maintain its space program. For me, arguments like that lost all potency when the government shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars into the drooling maws of bankers who shattered the world economy through their high-stakes gambling and came snivelling for cash when their bets went bust. Compared to that, compared to pretty much everything else the government does, NASA is pocket change. At no point in my lifetime has NASA's budget ever represented more than 1.05% of the United States federal budget. For 2011, it's getting $18.7 billion, which sounds like a lot... but not in the context of the largest economy on Earth.

Investment in systems such as this are investments in the future.


"Projects that are future-oriented, that, despite their political difficulties, can be completed only in some distant decade are continuing reminders that there will be a future. Winning a foothold on other worlds whispers in our ears that we're more than Picts or Serbs or Tongans: We're humans."
- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

The future is in danger these days. I can understand why, but it's still disturbing. People don't give much thought to the future when the present is uncertain, but that lack of thought undermines the foundation of the future. We owe it to ourselves to look ahead, to lift our eyes from the ground and force ourselves to look ahead, to step out of the shadows of discontent and fear we've been living in for years - to remind ourselves that one day things will be better. Things will be better, and if we take action along those lines today, that better time may not be too long after tomorrow.

Carl Sagan is right in that NASA's projects have not produced a lot of things that have "bread on the table" practical value compared to other major government projects like, say, the construction programs of the New Deal. But what's easy to overlook is that people can't live on bread alone. We need something more, a reason to move forward, something that tells us to look up and envision a better time - something that reminds us that there will be a better time. In these days, when pessimism is rampant and society is pulling the blinds tight, that sort of hope is valuable in a way that can't be demoninated in dollar signs. An optimistic society is a dynamic society, capable of great deeds. A pessimistic society, a society that believes the highest virtues are austerity and quiet desperation, is on a course to despair and irrelevancy.

Days like this, we need the future. The Space Launch System may yet help bring it here.

Photo: Descending Toward Sunset

There are a few places to get good photos of downtown Toronto, and while they generally tend to be close by - the Islands are fairly popular for that - the geography of the lakeshore doesn't mean they all are. I took this one from Prince of Wales Park in New Toronto, one of the former independent towns of south Etobicoke, and also captured a Porter Airlines Q400 on final approach to the Island Airport. It's incredible, I think, the degree to which downtown condo projects have taken over the downtown skyline; it's got to the point now where you have to be practically right next to SkyDome to see it and they're crowding out all but the tallest of the skyscrapers.

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There's Jewelery in the City Hall Basement

I was waiting for the Queen streetcar the other day, so of course I had plenty of time to think. Some parts of Toronto have changed drastically in the past year and some haven't changed at all, but what seems to be different no matter where you go in the megacity is the undercurrent that you're in Rob Ford's Toronto - and that is a drastically different city than the one I lived in. I didn't live in a Toronto where news of new proposed service cuts came every day, where the leadership was unresponsive to anything but its pre-plotted ideological course, and there wasn't a drop of gravy to be found.

What really gets me is the way it's been talked about. Rob Ford never talked about service cuts until very recently; it was always about "efficiencies," which is one of those all-too-common euphemisms that really means something along the lines of "we're going to save money by putting a bunch of people out of a job." To be honest, though, Rob Ford is no stranger to euphemisms or idiosyncratic phrasing; I've heard him make paeans to the "taxpayers" of Toronto time and time again, yet I've never come across an instance of him referring instead to the "citizens" or just "people" of the city. Personally, I find it rather offensive. The people of a city have a far more important role in it than simply being sources of tax revenue. I suppose this is one of the natural results of running the city as a business.

If that's what hizzoner is trying to do, though, he's doing an awful job. A business being run the way Toronto is right now would have people jumping ship for its competitors - too bad things don't work the same when it comes to municipal governments; I was able to get to British Columbia before the hammer came down, but plenty of people have no option but the Toronto option. The latest news is that cuts are going to be deep and brutal, and that Ford's support is unsurprisingly nosediving. It seems clear that Rob Ford's likely not going to be mayor four years from now, but it's still going to be a long four years.

Still, he's trying to run it as an efficient business... and so the cost-cutting recommendations include not only slashing necessary services like Blue Night late-night bus service or charging premium fares for them - because when I think premium, I think of the Vomit Comet at 2:30 in the morning - and of selling the Toronto Zoo and the city's performing arts centers. The KPMG consultants also recommended selling the Toronto Parking Authority's garages and parking lots, which bring in around $50 million a year. I don't doubt that in the days to come we'll start seeing recommendations to sell the lots to make up the gap.

That's when it hit me - the realization, not the Queen streetcar. If Ford and his ilk can continually frame the argument with terms like "taxpayers" and "efficiencies," it's not just a one-way road. I realized what he's doing, and what Toronto will likely see much, much more of before 2014.

Rob Ford is pawning off Toronto.

Infrastructure for cash! Your old, broken-down, profit-generating assets for cold hard cash!

It's really not surprising - this is the trajectory conservative governments follow time and again, taking advantage of difficult economic times by selling off publicly-owned assets to private developers, whether it be a favor for an election supporter or just misplaced ideological fervor. Look at Highway 407, Ontario's monument to that kind of thing - for a highway that cost $1.6 billion to build, in addition to $100 billion in land acquisition costs from the 1970s, the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris leased for ninety-nine years to a private company, in exchange for a one-time US$3.1 billion windfall and absolutely no say on what sort of tolls the company would charge.

The situation is potentially different with the performing arts centers and the zoo - I'm not sure how much money they bring in for the city. But what's more at issue here is this administration's willingness, almost eagerness, to cannibalize the city in search of short-term solutions. In my mind, selling off city-owned services should be a last resort - hell, it's not something you can rely on, because a service can only be sold once but the bills keep coming. Yet like a junkie pawning their toaster for another fix, the city government isn't really thinking of tomorrow. They'd be better off looking for William Lyon Mackenzie's pirate gold.

I'm damn glad that the election campaigns in Vancouver and New Westminster are, thus far, refreshingly normal - you know, aside from the newspaper commenters trying to crucify Mayor Gregor for installing bike lanes. Must be all that ocean breeze and B.C. bud.

Photo: Finding Lost Lands in Donut World

They're always in the place you'd least expect. Scientists say that visions of Atlantis as a continent in the Atlantic aren't supported by what's known about plate tectonics and the geography of the ocean floor, but frak that noise - the sign for Donut World, somewhere in San Francisco along the N Judah line, tells me otherwise. Look closely at that map up there. Not only does it depict Atlantis, rising up along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, there's what look to be shavings of Lemuria or Mu joining Japan and Indonesia, and the Bering land bridge appears to exist as well. Perhaps the eponymous Donut World is a parallel Earth where plate tectonics ran just slightly differently, making possible the production of donuts far beyond anything we know on our simple, seven-continented world.

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Reality in the Details

Details are important; for writers, they're how you establish the nature of your world. How important they are varies depending on what you're actually creating - for genres like sf and fantasy, defining and using background details properly is a key method to flesh out the world and demonstrate how it differs from what we're familiar with on modern Earth. Otherwise, using details properly to give a feeling of the world is not so important as just getting the details right. In most literature, the setting is reality unless noted, and the details are things that can easily be verified on Wikipedia or in a travel guide.

Errors in details are, I think, something that authors should strive to avoid. Note that there's a sliding scale in this kind of error; there's a distinction from a break from reality, intentional or no, which is actually used as a point in a story - like, say, the bit in the beginning of Goldeneye where James Bond is somehow able to catch up with a plummeting plane in freefall. I'm talking more along the lines of a story or movie that claims that the capital of Canada is Toronto, with the truth or falseness of it being completely irrelevant to the story at large.

This is not the Parliament of Canada. I promise.

This came up recently with X-Men: First Class. I've never seen it, but on a forum I visit I encountered some grousing about a reference in the movie where the US Navy's Seventh Fleet was sent to blockade Cuba. Just some military reference thrown in for verisimilitude, water off a duck's back, right? Depends if you've actually got some military familiarity. As it happens, the Seventh Fleet is based in Japan, is responsible for the western Pacific Ocean, and this has been the case for seventy years. A blockade of Cuba would be properly handled by ships of the Fourth Fleet, which has responsibility for the Caribbean less Puerto Rico and South America.

Now, you may say that this is irrelevant - in a movie with mutants and superpowers, who gives a shit about fleets? It all goes back to reality being the touchstone for all fiction, and how that reality should be modified sparingly. There's no reason I can think of that the presence of mutants and superpowers would effect the US Navy's fleet distribution. A changed detail like that wouldn't necessarily be out of place in, say, an alternate history story, except for the fact that it's rather obscure outside its field.

No, here the answer is simple - the writers fucked up and didn't check their work. Determining the deployment zones of US Navy fleets takes less than two minutes on Wikipedia. When I'm made aware of an error like that, an error that the writers evidently didn't think to check, it makes me wonder what else they got wrong. Errors in the details fracture the willing suspension of disbelief, no matter how relevant they are to the story as a whole.

Photo: At the Base

The last time I was in New York City, there was a World Trade Center. I had the opportunity to go up to the observation deck, but I didn't take it; I figured there would be another one someday. Instead, I got this photo of myself taken at the base of the towers - this was in June 1999, back when the future still looked as bright as the sunlight that bathed The Sphere in the background.

People and things can change a lot in ten years or more.

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Scrambling for a Choice

I can't say it's a surprise. It wasn't that long ago, just after Rob Ford was made hizzoner da mayor of Toronto, that he announced the war on cars was over. The surprising thing is that it's taken this long for the Fordists to train their sights on the scramble intersection at Dundas and Yonge. Don't forget that back in 2009 the Toronto Sun, Ford Nation's newspaper of record, classified scramble intersections as part of the war on cars - just below Pedestrian Sundays and well below speed bumps - and now that His Fordness has dealt with the pernicious threats posed by transit expansion and bike lanes, the new administration is free to focus on lesser threats to the dominance of the automobile.

If you've never crossed or seen a scramble intersection, the concept is simple: once the two cross streets have had their turn to go through the lights, every light at the intersection goes red for twenty-five seconds and pedestrians can cross in whatever direction they like. Yonge and Dundas, which in addition to being one of the many claimed locations of the center of the universe is where you'll find the Eaton Centre, the structure formerly known as Toronto Life Square, and Dundas Square, has an understandably large pedestrian presence - the Toronto Star referenced a city study that found that daily users on foot outnumbered those surrounded by wheels to the tune of 17,000.

Not that it matters, apparently. Earlier this week Denzil Minnan-Wong, the chairman of the city's public works committee and one of Ford's staunch allies, called for a surprise review of the scramble before more can be built. The fact that he tried to justify it in vaguely environmental terms - asking whether scrambles were the best way "if it takes pedestrians thirty extra seconds to cross... yet vehicles are being lined up for four or five minutes spewing all that exhaust" - just makes it even more disingenuous. Suddenly the Ford administration cares about exhaust being spewed into the air? Transit City would've provided an alternative to exhaust-spewing cars and buses throughout huge stretches of the city, you know.

But we mustn't forget the war on cars, or the fact that the Fordists' power base is in the suburbs, where cars are free to zoom along and sidewalks are those lonely strips of pavement that see about as many footprints as Tranquility Base. It's not surprising that the champions of the suburbs would champion pro-suburban ideals; nor is it surprising that they'd attempt to impose those ideals on the downtown core that came out strongly against them in the last election.

Here's hoping they get a fight on their hands.

Pedestrians cross one side of the Yonge-Dundas scramble intersection in front of a streetcar... two enemies of the car working hand-in-glove!

You know what? I'm sick and tired of it all, of the notion that the car is something precious and fragile that has to be coddled and catered to at every possible opportunity to the greatest possible degree, like some spoiled sixteen-year-old wannabe princess. I grant that traffic congestion is an important issue to address, given that so many people have no other way to get around thanks to the monumental fuckwittery that has been enshrined in North American patterns of development for the last seventy years, but the answer to that is not to give cars more perks. It's not to make the roads wider. It's to enhance other choices.

From my point of view, I have a real hard time feeling sorry for the driver on Dundas that has to wait a couple of minutes longer now than before the scramble was put in place. That driver can still make a trip in ten minutes that would take me an hour on foot - even longer out in the sprawls that were built with the assumption that modern folk have wheels riveted to their hips. Aside from spots here and there where the more person-focused layouts of the past still hold sway, today's society is built around the automobile. Rob Ford and his ilk are like those Japanese soldiers that went guerilla on Pacific islands and stayed that way for decades - the war's been over for a long time and they don't even realize it. Except that their side was the one that won.

I think the primacy of the car was rooted deep enough in the modern cityscape that we can afford a few sops to pedestrians here and there.