The world of international politics, trade, human rights, police actions, war, and policy is a thorny topic. Most people have opinions, but have they really studied the way the nations work, what the UN is supposed to be, or how the international legal system cooperates with each other? How can you judge without learning about what you're judging? Such uneducated judgment is just the imposition of another form of dogma than the one you disagree with, not an evolution of society.

I don't ever want to be in government. Politicians have to mince their words to avoid offending people in hopes that they'll still vote for them if they're not blatantly against those people.

While I use the rule of law to make my judgements of political actions, I do sympathize with anyone who feels restricted by the existing political system when they want to do what they feel is right for the country. But your wishes for a better world have to be curtailed by a respect for the laws and procedures of the nation you choose to lead, otherwise you don't have democracy, you have a dictatorship.

The rules of a nation take precedence over international agreements and treaties. A treaty which violates the Constitution or Charter of Rights is an illegal contract. Illegal contracts have no force of law in national courts nor in the international counsels that arbitrate treaty violations. It may have taken decades for the system to realize a treaty is in violation of the Charter or Constitution, but they're still illegal and can't be upheld when found in violation.

Some people like to paint the use of economic and trade sanctions as a suppression of the freedom of foreign nations. I disagree. The world has to have a means of letting abusive governments know that the world disagrees with the way they're treating their people or threatening global stability without resorting to invasions and war. If not sanctions, then what? Diplomatic dialog only works if someone is willing to listen and learn; the stubborn ones need to be beaten with the stick of international sanctions to teach them a lesson and force them to change their ways, the same as any other willful child needs to be punished and taught the error of their ways.

Lately I've been seeing apologists, including Ron Paul, saying we shouldn't have international sanctions against Iran, that Iran has the right to rule their own people as they see fit. What I see is a leader who periodically dives off the deep end and makes wild conspiracy theory accusations with no proof. It makes me question whether power has made him psychotically paranoid, and whether the pressure is making him lose his sanity. I have the same concerns about some of Chavez' comments, even though I see nothing in Chavez' policy to warrant sanctions of any kind.

Where sanctions fail is when their mission is lost and they're upheld against a nation without any clear definition of what that nation has to do to have the sanctions lifted. The Americans have persecuted Cuba for over 50 years. It's leader has retired, the USSR that was behind the Cuban Missile Crisis is no more, and it's people suffer in poverty for the crime of being "communists" and "socialists." US policy has no goal, no conditions for ending the sanctions, and no purpose except a vindictive revenge on an entire nation for the mistakes made by their leaders THREE GENERATIONS AGO.

Neither the Harper government in Canada nor the Obama administration in the US want to abide by the restrictions on their policies imposed by the Charter of Rights and the US Constitution, respectively. They want to implement policy that violates those seminal documents, even going so far as to publicly justify their illegal legislation because it won't be applied to "citizens." Well, those documents talk about fundamental HUMAN rights that apply to EVERYONE who lives in our nations, not just those who have citizenship.

The NDAA and SOPA are particularly odious.

NDAA denies the accused their right to be charged, arrested, processed, and to defend themselves in a fair and speedy trial. Instead, it seeks to "detain" people without charges, a hearing, or even an approval from a judge as you'd need for a wiretap. Does America want to bring back the Japanese internment camps? Weren't they embarassing enough the first time?

SOPA seeks to allow the US and it's media companies to not just arbitrarily censor the internet, but to completely remove the DNS entries for any site they disagree with. Yet this is the same nation that spends so much time decrying the Chinese censorship of the internet. There are existing international and regional laws for dealing with violations of copyright and patents; SOPA is wrong headed, immoral, and probably illegal.

This isn't about piracy, people. It's about whether those accused of piracy are allowed to defend themselves at all, or whether they're going to be subject to the arbitrary dictatorship of a country and it's enforcement departments without any notice, charges, legal recourse, or respect for the proceedings of national or international law.

I have no interest in carrying a cell phone and being leashed to harassment by customers and employers 24x7. Leave a message on my landline or send an email -- I'll get back to you when I have time, not cater to your impatient demands for instant service impinging on my personal life.

Seeing as I don't want to carry around a phone all the time, what I want is a tablet device that will let me use a stylus to scribble notes and diagrams, a true replacement for pen and paper.

I want the option of having those scribblings analyzed for text content, graphical components, and an interface to clean up those scribblings and turn them into a proper document on my home/main system when I get back from collecting notes at a client site.

It might be nice to have 4G and phone connectivity from the tablet device, maybe even skype video conferencing support, but I'd rather just clip a bluetooth headset to my ear and have it talk to the tablet than deal with an actual cell phone.

If you want to get fancy, let me use the bluetooth headset to "command" the tablet through a voice interface. I don't mean being able to say "Select File. Select Save As. ..." type dialogs, but Siri Part II: Siri Meets Watson. With an actual tablet, the device has enough power to do the voice analysis and grammar parsing without resorting to a central server like Siri has to because of the low CPU power and memory of a cell phone.

In short, I'm still waiting for someone to follow through and bring Alan Kay's ideas to market instead of trying to tell me that being able to play "Angry Birds" is more innovative and useful than being able to take notes.

1. Computer programs are considered literary works subject both to copyright and can be granted a certificate of copyright registration by the copyright office.

2. Here, the provincial government exempts the first $60,000 per year of income earned by the original copyright owner fro, performances of copyright works.

3. For $50, it's worth registering copyright, then claiming the deduction for income earned off of websites and Software-as-a-Service web apps. Register it in 3 peoples' names, and each one can earn $60k subject only to federal taxes.

Definitely on my to-do list in the new year.

Investors like to know about your customer base and your projected value in the future before they'll make you a fair offer. I find it rather insulting that they under-value sweat equity.

I've spent at least 20 hours per week, 52 weeks a year, for 15 years doing the research, development, testing, and enhancements to this system. That's a low-ball estimate of 15,600 hours of programming.

At $75/hour (a very reasonable rate for a senior consultant), that's an investment of $1,170,000. The truth is I've probably put in double that number of hours, and had I remained in the US and Greater Toronto Area, that billing rate would be more on the order of $125-150/hour, plus expenses.

There's no way in I'm taking the typical "angel investor" terms with that much as my opening stake in the business. No one in their right mind would table a fair offer to invest in a business that doesn't even exist yet, and which has no customers.

If you want to try out the technology that will be driving Singularity One, you can check out the GPLv3 licensed research and development project at http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net/ That's right -- you can try out a multi-million dollar tool and even use it for free if you can stomach the licensing terms of the GPL (some businesses can't or won't, and for their attitude I'm thankful -- they're the ones I hope to service and partner with.)

Before you even think about coming to the negotiation table with potential investors, you have to know what you've invested so far, what the realistic revenue potential is, and show a plan for getting to those goals.

You have to admit it's one heck of a retirement savings plan! Tax free, too, until I actually earn revenue from the investment.

Summary for the TL;DR crowd: Quebec, not California, Nevada, or Florida, will be the first to default on its' bonds.

The context

Unlike the RoC (Rest of Canada, aka Kanuckistan), Poutineville (Quebec, aka a lot of other names, none good) has the highest deficit in the country, and the 6th-highest in the world.

It also has the 6th-lowest average income when compared to the RoC and the US., and the highest tax rates.

All this, combined with more than 4 decades of anti-English legislation (started in 1968 with Bill 63, then on to Bill 22 in 1974, and Bill 101 in 1977), resulted in Montreal losing its' status, not just as the head-office capital of Canada, but also as a financial and trade center.

Throw in almost 10% of the population leaving over the next decade for greener pastures, and you have the basis for inevitable decline.

The latest

I'll look at taxes on 3 income brackets - $20kpa (thousand per annum), $40kpa, and $60kpa.

Federal income tax is $1,420.95, $4,642.40, and $8,712.72 respectively.

Quebec income tax plus other taxes are ~ $3,500, $$4,900, and $9,250 respectively (it varies a LOT depending on a lot of small factors).

So, assuming that each person spends $13,000 on "basic living expenses" - rent, food, and $1,000 for heat and light), of which only rent and food do not have sales taxes added, that leaves the following:

$2,079.05, $30,457.60, and $42,037.29 respectively.

The current sales taxes

Obviously, someone earning $20kpa isn't going to be socking away money - whatever comes in gets spent. Also, eventually ALL money gets spent on something ... so it ends up getting taxed again at some point. In calculating the sales actual tax bite, we have to add back the $1,000 for heat and light, because that's taxed. The current rate is 5% federal sales tax (GST) and 8.5% provincial (QST), but because the province taxes the federal tax, the actual provincial rate is 8.925%.

So, total additional sales taxes paid are:
$428.75, $4,241,22, and $5,992.94 respectively.

The total tax burden at each level is:
On $20,000 a year income, $5,349.70 (26.75%) tax,
$40,000 a year income, $13,783.42 (34.46%) tax,
$60,000 a year income, $23,995.66 (40.0%) tax.

This does not include things like high drivers licenses ($100 a year and up), car registration fees ($300 for a car, $1,400 for a motorcycle more than 400cc), gasoline taxes (at $6 a gallon, half tax).

Raising the sales tax - again - vs job losses
On January 1st, 2011, Quebec had raised the sales tax by 1%. The problem with raising sales taxes is that it decreases consumption, simply by making everything more expensive. For someone who only has discretionary disposable income of a few hundred a month, the impact is going to make itself felt. "Oh, it's only 1%" ... so they're doing it again in a few days ... to 9.5% (actually 9.975% because of the tax-on-tax), for a combined federal/provincial sales tax rate of 14.975%.

Here's how it affects the bottom line for each income bracket.

Updated additional sales taxes paid (old figures in parens) $461.08 (428.75)
$4,710.76 (4,241.22)
$6,444.83 ($5,992.94)

The impact on total income and total tax paid:

So, the total tax burden at each level is:
On $20,000 a year income, $5382.03 ($5,349.70)
$40,000 a year income, $14,252.96 (13,783.42)
$60,000 a year income, $24,447.55 (23,995.66)

The impact on jobs and tax revenue in a declining economy
For every 1000 taxpayers at the median ($40,000 a year), the tax take is just over $14 million a year.

The increase from a 1% sales tax is a lot less - only $469,500 per thousand. Keep that figure in mind - because it's going to disappear in a few moments.

Raising sales taxes doesn't necessarily have an immediate effect on jobs - after all, if a job takes 2 people to do, it's going to continue to take 2 people to do ... until the business closes because of reduced sales. When there are plenty of jobs that are already "on the cusp", pulling additional money out of the economy (via sales tax increases) directly reduces the number of jobs by the same amount, and then some, since you now pass a tipping point. In other words, taking $469,500 from those 1000 taxpayers means 11 of them lose their jobs (and in this economy, it's permanently).

So now, the government loses the "tax take" from those 11 jobs - $156,782.56.

They also lose the employer's payroll taxes, for an additional hit of $150,000.00.

Program spending goes up as well, first with employment insurance claims, but we'll ignore those, first because they're limitied to 1 year max, and because that's "federal money", so it supports local spending, and then, since there is every indication that those jobs are permanently gone (thanks to the highest taxes in North America), ultimately they will end up on welfare, which is a provincial responsibility. We're already seeing this from the sales tax increase in January 2011, where unemployment rates were still trending downwards slightly before going back up this year, but welfare rates barely budged - the natural population increase was already overwhelming the feeble number of new jobs created.

So, those 11 new welfare recipients will have a direct cost, on average, of about $9,000 per year, plus dental, medical, etc., and administrative overhead. Say, $15k. That's an additional $165,000.00 in costs.

In other words, this year's 1% sales tax increase might have pulled in a bit more revenue, net, but actually caused a loss of $2,000 - not counting any knock-on effects from the reduced consumer spending, and raising the overall "misery index."

The Canadian housing bubble bursts, and over-indebted consumers

Finally, people are realizing what I've been saying for 4 years - that Canada is not immune to a housing bubble, and not to buy. Worse, the average Canadian household is actually deeper in debt than their US counterpart, so not only is Canada no longer all that "different" (despite not having a banking system that is p0wned by Wall Street), but consumers just don't have any resilience left.

This is especially true, again, in Quebec, where it's Greece-like public debt levels (despite receiving $1,000 per capita in direct federal financial aid, and ~ another $1000 in indirect aid), leave no room for government intervention. The job losses will continue, and the rate will accelerate. This is going to be a replay of the 1977-1987 "Made In Quebec" lost decade, but uglier.

How will it play out? The same way that the '77 bust played out - a massive exodus of people, a financial and social "brain drain", and deflating pay packets for those who stay behind.

This time it IS different

1. The rest of the country will NOT bail Quebec out this time by re-working the equalization formula and giving Quebec even more federal cash. Those days are gone.

2. Quebec can not hit up the bond markets to take on additional debt to finance the debt death spiral.

3. There aren't enough english-quebecers left to leave to "make room for" french-quebecers to take their jobs.

Lessons from Sim City

Anyone who's ever played Sim City knows how this works out in the end - decreasing revenue per capita, increasing expenses, neither raising taxes nor lowering them works. Raising taxes just makes more jobs and people leave. Lowering them means you just get into more debt. Either way, eventually your city dies.

I can fight for what I believe in without fear of arrest as an enemy of the state, a terrorist, or just being shot by a military government that doesn't like me.

I'm lucky to be a citizen instead of a politician. I don't have to worry about getting elected, I don't have to compromise my values to win your trust and your vote, and I don't have to mince words to avoid a media firestorm.

I'm an educated, opinionated, debate-loving bastard, and I actually love to get someone pissed off and fired up enough to argue with me about some point I've made. It means I got their attention and made them think.

I really appreciate it when people correct me by proving me wrong about something. You can't win the war if you're not willing to learn by losing a few battles along the way.

The inspiration: Slashdot has a tyrant.

What level do you browse slashdot at

+5 I'm too young to die!
+4 Don't hurt baby jeebus!
+3 Hey not too rough!.
+2 In Soviet Russia, Slashdot browses YOU!
+1 Hurt me plenty!
0 I'm CowboyNealClone - I need my daily dose of goat guy and tubgirl!
-1 Nightmare

I've finished changing the look of the MSS Code Factory project website, a shift to black on light grey from the neon blue on navy I had been using. Much to my chagrin, I tried printing out a few pages of the site just before leaving for Christmas vacation, and found that unless you fiddle with the Firefox settings, the text comes out as a very light, unreadable grey with the neon blue foreground colours.

I always intended that the reference material for the project be easily printable for offline use.

Times have changed ...

When it required 1/3 of the labour force to produce enough food to feed everyone, there was enough work going around, most of the time, to provide a job to most of the population.

Ever since the nature of work changed, in large part due to the increasingly-small portion of the population required to work to feed everyone (from 33% to < 2%), those jobs (and the economy as a whole) shifted to the production of consumer goods and services.

Of course, with even those jobs now requiring fewer workers to produce more, we're into our 3rd "jobless recovery." Each one has been longer and more painful than the previous one. This one will probably be permanent, because "this time it's different" is true. Computing power, which started the trend of replacing workers with automation decades ago, is now SO cheap that a lot of jobs are simply going to disappear - and the net means that many of those that are left will be going to the lowest bidder.

So, what does this mean?

1. The older you are, the more vulnerable you are to a layoff turning into forced early retirement.

2. As in all recessions, the longer you're out of work, the longer you're likely to continue to stay out of work, creating a pernicious negative feedback loop. Using the "down time" to acquire new skills no longer works because the hiring process has also become too automated to be able to distinguish between (just one example) 10 years experience, and 1 years experience repeated 10x.

Combine this with #1, and the age at which someone is no longer going to get looked at continues to drop.

3. Being able to produce quality is no longer important for many jobs, because the customer isn't looking for quality - how can they, when they don't even know what they want, and instead of telling them "look, this is what you really need", "designers" and their ilk continue to pollute the industry, supplying crap from "corporate data-mining dashboards" to "web sites that suck".

Of course, the older you get, the less likely you'll be able to stomach putting out drek w/o pointing out that it IS drek - so once a worker is "of a certain age" (funny, that phrase used to only apply to describing women "of a certain age"), they are also less employable.

So, at what age will 1/2 of all IT workers be no longer employable? The answer will vary by sector, with games probably being a much lower age than someone doing Oracle, but what do you think the average age will be next year?

Also, please note that I am in no way implying that IT is a "young persons game" - just that socio-economic factors mean more than skill or raw talent (I know, "So what else is new?").

Merry Christmas!
Happy Hanukkah!
Joyous Kwanzaa!
(And a little late) Peaceful Ramadan!

Everyone knows and shares the sentiments of the Christmas season, no matter which holiday they grew up celebrating. It's a time for family, friends, and food.

Everyone has wishes around Christmas Time. Here are mine:

• That my new business do well enough to feed me and provide a comfortable retirement in 5 years
• That everyone who is ill experiences a miraculous remission of their ailments
• That you may find yourself surrounded by friends, family, and too much food at this time of year
• That Harper and his cohorts experience an epiphany and realize that in order to lead instead of dictate, they have to consider the restrictions of the Charter of Rights BEFORE enacting legislation or policy, otherwise they're just hurting citizens, wasting the courts time, wasting their time, and acting like traitors to the very national ideals of our country of Canada.
• That Apple has a miraculous epiphany and submits their patented gestures and behaviours as part of a tablet UI standard in memory of the CUA.

Notice invoking copyright protection over terms to be registered for the operation of a new corporation registered in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada in early 2012.

Singularity One prototype website and notice of copyright.

I've been thinking about some philosophical issues around taxation in Canada that might apply to other jurisdictions as well. In Canada, we have a national GST/HST program. GST is is the Goods and Services tax; HST are provincial agreements for Harmonized Sales Tax where the same collection system is used for a combined federal/provincial GST-like tax base.

I understand the desire to tax manufactured goods, so the "Goods" part of the name makes sense, as do the Revenue Canada regulations for how to offset GST/HST collected vs. GST/HST paid out during normal business operations.

Collecting a tax on human services is also reasonable, as there is obvious value to what gets done by everyone from your hairdresser/barber to your plumber or computer services technician. The government would miss out on a huge revenue stream if they were to settle for the payroll employment taxes they already collect from anyone who earns their income by providing the service of working for a living!

Danged greedy double-dipping bastards have alway had me collecting GST when I worked in Canada for my software development services. But I digress....

Note that I said "human services". Computer provisioned software-as-a-service or what are more commonly thought of as "cloud providers" are a different beast. They're a leasing and licensing oriented business, providing neither physical nor intellectual goods, but only a lease for the storage space required by the customer's data that they've created themselves.

So I guess I need to find out how GST/PST regulations apply to computer service leases.

I have no idea whatsoever how license and royalty revenue fit into the picture in Canada, never mind any other jurisdictions.

In a nutshell, unless there are explicit clauses saying otherwise, I don't believe GST/PST would apply to the leasing aspects of my business. I'm not selling a product or a good, I'm providing data storage management and transformations.

There won't be any human service providers (well, not none, but most of them won't be techies) with my business model, except for training and customization consultants who might choose to work through my business instead of their own or some other competitor. Those services are something I need to provide, not something I want to do. I'd much rather farm them out through partnerships.

I'm digressing again. I had a lot of time to think about these questions while working on my buddy's machine over the past few days.

Tax law and how it applies to:

• Physical goods
• Intellectual goods
• Human-provided services
• Storage and compute leasing
• License royalties

The latest scam in the self-help line - "How to stop your divorce."

This takes the whole marriage counselor scam to a new level ...

The simple fact is that pair-bonding in humans is governed by the same hormones as in other mammals - oxytocin and vasopressin - and that it varies from person to person. Only half of all humans have the right level to form a permanent pair bond.

This latest scam is preying on vulnerable people, with zero scientific basis (in fact, marriage counseling as a whole is based on the wrong notion that people should, if possible, stay together, when they may simply not be biologically equipped to stay in a pair relationship).

Sample: "How to get your spouse to change". If there's one thing we know, the surest way to alienate someone is to try to change them. Hey, if you were a dirty rotten b*st*rd yesterday, you're still going to be a dirty rotten b*st*rd tomorrow, and that's your right. Nobody has a right to try to change you, and anyone who would try to needs to get over it and kick your sorry a** to the curb - for both your sakes. Maybe there's someone out there who WANTS a dirty rotten b*st*rd? Maybe they're not really a dirty rotten b*st*ard and the problem is you? Maybe there's really nothing wrong, maybe it's just time for both of you to move on?

Or maybe the real explanation is that one or both of you are not the pair-bonding type. About half are, so that means that we can only expect (without the exertion of external pressure such as social expectations) that 1 in 4 pairs formed at random will stick it out for life, 2 in 4 will have one partner who wants to stick it out while the other wants out, and 1 in 4 pairs will go "What were we thinking? Let's just stay friends with benefits" or "GTFO NOW!" It's just the way people are by nature.

Of course,it's so much more profitable to tease people with a "formula" and ad-babble like "How to increase your marriage IQ", while implying that if they don't "make their marriage work", they're failures.

But what can you expect from someone who made their money doing direct mail advertising (dead tree spam)?

I have a 100% guaranteed method of ending the "divorce epidemic." Ban marriages. Problem solved. The best part of this solution is that maybe people will treat each other better when they can't just "take the relationship for granted", AND as a bonus, when it does fall apart, there's no extra stress from legally ending it. Let the lawyers chase somewhere else for money, or DIAF.