Toronto budget crisis not an issue in provincial campaign, says the CBC. Gee, what a surprise. Who could’ve seen that one coming? Besides everyone in Ontario, I mean.

With metro Toronto split between the Liberals, likely to win another term come tomorrow, and the NDP, who is certain to remain an also-ran, exactly what incentive did anyone have to woo Toronto voters? The Liberals have most of the city locked up no matter what; the NDP doesn’t have the resources to make a whole lot of aggressive moves outside their home ridings; and the Tories will never, ever win many votes inside the downtown core. That means the Liberals don’t have to do much to win our loyalty, the NDP can promise the moon because they’ll never have to deliver, and the Tories can tell us to fuck off because we always tell them the same. No wonder we don’t have any bargaining power in the provincial government. Oh, and consider that the federal electoral situation is pretty much the same, with the Tories shut out of the major cities—including Toronto. We don’t seem to be having a whole lot of luck with the Harper government either.

Seriously, anyone who couldn’t see this coming—like the city councillors that voted to postpone a decision on tax hikes in order to see what the provincial parties would promise us—must be willfully blind.

Harper to Toronto: drop dead. Not only is Toronto unlikely to see any direct benefits from the recent federal budget surplus, but it turns out the feds want their pound of flesh too:

The Royal Canadian Mint, a corporation of the federal government, has now demanded that the City of Toronto pay $47,680 for the public education campaign. Included in this amount is a request for $10,000 for the use of the words “one cent” in the campaign website address (www.onecentnow.ca) and the campaign email address (onecentnow@toronto.ca), and an additional $10,000 for the use of the words “one cent” in the campaign phone number (416-ONECENT). The remaining $27,680 has been assessed against the City for the use of the image of the Canadian penny in printed materials such as pins and posters.

A victory and a defeat. Here in Toronto, our streets have been dominated by stands serving mostly hot dogs and all kinda of sausage foodstuffs. Aside from the chip trucks at Nathan Phillips Square, which sell a slightly wider variety of cheap food, we’ve been living in a very limited street food ecosystem—something that’s not always clear to me unless I spend some time with friends who’ve been all over the world, or grew up in countries where food carts were far more common and served more interesting fare than the 100% beef wiener. But that’s all about to change, as Ontario loosens the regulatory red tape keeping hot dogs king. And while I doubt the likes of Izakaya will be taking to the streets come August, it’s very likely that the multiculturalism Toronto is so known for will lead to plenty of new tasty treats.

Multiculturalism may be the furthest thing from the minds of legislators in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. You may remember the parish as one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Since then, the Hispanic population of New Orleans has swelled as workers come to the city for reconstruction work. One of the side effects of the influx—from 15,000 Hispanic people before the storm to an estimated 50,000 today—is the taco truck, rapidly becoming a common fixture on the streets of New Orleans. For some bizarre reason, however, Jefferson Parish officials have decided the taco trucks have to go, despite being embraced by both the nascent Hispanic community and the local Southerners who have come to appreciate the authentic Mexican fare. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin says the trucks will still be welcome on his streets, though city council president Oliver Thomas isn’t too pleased with the trucks overrunning what’s left of the traditional New Orleans culture. “How do the tacos help gumbo?” Thomas told the Times-Picayune.

If it’s not too far or too cold, I imagine those taco trucks will find a welcome home up here and a chorus of thanks from Torontonians tired of two-dollar hot dogs.

The Iraqi people did suffer greatly under unjust rule. But in truth, it is the duty of any people that wishes to be free to fight for its own independence. Had France meddled in our revolution beyond the guidance and material assistance they provided, I should think similar unrest would have darkened our nation’s earliest hours.

—George Washington, courtesy of the Onion.

Fun day on the intertubes today. In all my time on the internet I’ve seen online communities do a lot of strange things in the name of mob justice, but nothing quite like the apparently spontaneous Digg revolt. An amazingly swift and complete rejection of the idea that you can censor a number.

P.S. Everyone’s favourite HD DVD master decryption key now has its own domain name. Let’s see the AACS Licensing Authority attempt to take down THAT.

P.S. That number again is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

Hot on the heels of a Copyright Royalty Board decision that could potentially kill internet radio as we know it, a possible hail-mary save. The CRB decided earlier this year that webcasters and internet radio stations, who’ve been paying royalties on the songs they play as a percentage of revenue, should start paying strictly enforced fees per song and listener. The formula is simple but deadly: take a base rate per song (11/100ths of a cent, but potentially increasing over the next five years), multiply that by the number of songs played in an hour, multiply that by the number of listeners in an hour, and you have the cost in royalties per hour of airtime. With this revamped metric, smaller broadcasters were shocked to discover their royalty costs swallowing up their revenue and then some. No less than NPR filed an appeal, saying the vastly increased fees were capricious, but to no avail.

That’s why if you support sites like Pandora, Last.fm and the mighty NPR, and you live in the United States, you’ll want to get in touch with your representatives and ask them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would reverse the Royalty Board’s decision and return to a flat-fee-plus-revenue-percentage model. As someone who grew up listening to tons of internet radio—I owe my musical tastes to a guy in Portland named Rich and a site called indiepopradio—I know full well the impact rising costs can have on internet radio, and the power of internet radio to reach people and expose them to music, culture and opinions outside what’s available on the local dial. We lose these stations and webcasters and we might as well go back to the bad old days when Clear Channel ruled everything.

Man, I really like David Miller and I’m rooting for the One Cent Now campaign to work, but I just don’t see it happening:

“We’re going to where the power is, which is with the people,” Miller said in an interview with CBC Radio’s Here and Now, explaining he hopes citizens will help him pressure the federal government.

That’s great, except the people of Toronto elected you because they thought the power to pressure the federal government lay with you. The Conservatives sure as hell aren’t going to listen to “the people,” since no one in the GTA elected a Conservative candidate; even with one GTA MP switching his allegiance, it’s still pretty clear that the Conservatives aren’t interested in Toronto or any of the other urban centres that overwhelmingly voted against a Conservative government.

This campaign is a tacit admission by Miller that he can’t pressure higher levels of government effectively where it counts: funding. Not that we needed any more evidence:

In his re-election victory speech last November, Miller called on the federal and provincial government to give Toronto one cent of the sales tax collected in the city, saying he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Both levels of government said no.

The New Yorker takes on the politics of 24.

Ars Technica reports that Canada is considering harsh copyright legislation that could destroy the concept of fair use as we know it. It may also include provisions outlawing the circumvention of digital rights management schemes currently in use to protect digital music and movie downloads.

In short, this is shaping up to be Canada’s version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If the mere thought of a Canadian DMCA doesn’t chill your spine, consider some of the problems the DMCA has caused. Breaking the copy protection on some major-label albums in order to rip the tracks to put on your MP3 player is illegal under the DMCA, even though that’s arguably a fair use of the product. Copying a DVD for backup purposes? Illegal—because in order to do so you’d need to break the CSS encryption on the DVD.

But what’s worse is that the DMCA represents a way of thinking about copyright and intellectual property that benefits mainly large corporations with huge libraries of backlist content. That way of thinking is the reason why we have debates about the broadcast flag, intended to prevent people from recording television shows to watch later. It’s the reason why the RIAA still thinks ripping MP3s off a CD should be illegal, and continues to sue individuals that download music off the internet. It’s the reason why a travesty like the DIVX content system was created, it’s the reason why Peter Gutmann thinks Windows Vista’s content protection may “constitute the longest suicide note in history,” and it’s the reason why you should be very worried about any talk of trusted computing modules.

And in case you’re at all swayed by the argument that artists somehow aren’t getting paid because of illegal downloads, the artists have something to tell you. In short: DRM stifles innovation, downloads often benefit artists instead of hindering them, and the current model often fucks the artist over anyway. All the DMCA and the pending Canadian legislation do is protect an outdated and arguably broken business model.

The ministers responsible for the legislation: Maxime Bernier of Industry and Bev Oda of Canadian Heritage. Contact information for Bev Oda. Helpful links from Boing Boing, including this very interesting article about a fundraiser for Oda sponsored by the broadcast industry. Guess who the other minister scheduled to appear was?

The United States puts out as much greenhouse gas emissions as the UK, Brazil and China combined. That’s a pretty damning statistic in itself, and it’s something people should think about. But there’s also something Science magazine and the World Research Institute should think about: bad infographics.

Unfortunately, the Science article that contains this map is behind a pay wall, and the Climate Analysis Indicators Tool requires registration and possibly affiliation with an organization. In any case, very few people are going to take the extra steps to register and sift through the raw data to figure out what the map means. That’s the whole point of infographics like these—to distill mountains of data and highlight the main findings. The map is supposed to give you an idea of how the United States stacks up against other countries when it comes to emissions.

So tell me this: what fraction of the United States’ emissions does Brazil represent?

Not so easy to figure out, is it? Here’s some questions that pop into my mind when I see this. First, the map is split into states, and each nation’s footprint fits neatly inside state lines. Does that mean that Brazil’s emissions footprint is equal to exactly the emissions from the specific midwestern states it covers? Or is it equal to the fraction of the United States represented by the area those states cover? After all, the World Research Institute claims California is one of the top 30 emitters in the world, and it’s included in the UK’s footprint. Comparatively, the midwestern states probably produce fewer emissions (based solely on my assumption that population density is lower and thus emissions are lower—I may very well be wrong, but that’s somewhat besides the point). So, even though Brazil’s footprint appears larger on the map, is its emissions footprint perhaps smaller than that of the UK, whose footprint includes California? Who knows? The map gives you no way to tell.

That one issue makes the whole map harder to understand. When China is shown to take up more than half of the United States, does that actually mean China produces half the emissions of the United States? But China’s footprint includes all of the high-emission states except California, so does China actually produce substantially more? What about Canada, stuck in the dense northwestern states. How does its emissions footprint compare to, say, South Korea? Are they, in fact, roughly equal? Are they each only about a fifth of Brazil’s footprint? The map implies relationships that may or may not be there; it’s ambiguous, a very bad thing when you’re trying to clarify a complicated issue.

It’s nice to be able to slap together some fancy graphics in order to make a point, but this is one of those cases where a simple bar chart would’ve told you so much more about where each country stands compared to the States. All I get out of this graphic is the message that the States produces a lot of emissions—an important message, but blindingly obvious. Once you get past that revelation, the map gives you little idea of just how bad things are. Since that’s sort of the whole point of the map, it can be classified a failure.