A great defence of the freedom to read by my favourite author when a North Dakota community burns his book. More at MetaFilter.
In completely unrelated news, we’re off to Minot, ND for a weekend of water slides, shopping and America-only treats like Pandora and Cherry Coke. 😉
A very cool announcement from Google about an experimental, augmented reality wearable computer (translation: futuristic eyeglasses) that could crush Apple’s iPhone dominance if it takes off.
RPL had a successful strike vote tonight which means this is my theme song for the foreseeable future…
I’ve done some April Fool’s jokes on this blog before but this year, it sort of snuck up on me so I didn’t have anything planned. Instead, I’ll link to a new sub-Reddit that was created just to track various 2012 April Fool’s stuff from around the web.
Speaking of Reddit, they had their own joke, announcing the launch of Reddit Timeline, a play on the Facebook offering which allows you to visit sub-reddits throughout time into both the past and future.
These are real, working sub-reddits and users can submit stories to them, just as they would in any other sub-Reddit, similar to a couple other popular sub-Reddits that are sort of the same idea, most notably /r/AncientWorldProblems.
Had a bit of a sad day on Friday when we took Pace to a farewell party for him, a couple classmates and one of the teachers at his daycare
Pace has gone to Bright Beginnings Daycare since he was eighteen months old – virtually his entire life when you think about it. He started at their original location and when they expanded to a second location which was only a short walk from our house, Pace moved there.
In some ways, we’re lucky we ended up with such an amazing daycare.
Around the time Pace turned one and knowing that Shea would be taking an extended maternity leave until he was 18 months, we began calling around looking for a daycare. It was scary to realise that most daycares – both formal centres and home-based ones – had long waiting lines at the time.
Finally, we managed to find a spot at Bright Beginnings. Their original location is attached to a low-income housing area and I hate to admit that Shea and I were a bit nervous about this. It definitely wasn’t the Y with all the middle-class toddlers in their immaculate new clothes and sparkling toys and not where we expected to end up leaving our son.
But the staff were very kind and welcoming and the Director also went out of her way to accommodate our unique schedule (Shea works the equivalent of a half-time position but the 2-3 days she works vary each week so we couldn’t guarantee a consistent schedule to the daycare. They were not only willing to go along with this but structured our fees so it was more advantageous to us than to them! Many daycares would’ve charged us for a full-time spot for not being able to guarantee which days Pace would be in but Bright Beginnings offered to charge us only the daily rate for when Pace was there and not even require a monthly minimum!)
As I mentioned above, when Bright Beginnings expanded to a new location which was much closer to our house about a year ago, Pace jumped to this one and it’s been even better than the original. I could now pick him up easily even though I take the bus each day and he was in a place with brand new toys, furnishings and equipment plus many of his favourite instructors who also moved over from the original location.
Unfortunately, ever-expanding costs for fuel has meant that Bright Beginnings has had to recently do away with another luxury that many daycares don’t offer – a van that could drive school-aged kids from both locations to nearby schools.
We really want Pace to go to the elementary school closest to our house so we had to make the difficult decision to pull him out of this daycare and move him to a home-based daycare, just a couple doors down from where we live (and again, in another streak of luck, it’s one that didn’t have a spot when we were originally looking five years ago but happened to have a spot when we decided to move Pace.)
This new home-based daycare will be an adjustment – for Pace and for us – but again, I think it’s the right move at the right time. The woman who runs it has a number of other kids who are around Pace’s age and will be attending the same school as him so these will be the kids who will likely form his peer group for the next few years, it’s even more convenient for Shea and I then the second Bright Beginnings location (which was more convenient than the first one Pace was at.)
Still, it’s sad to leave Bright Beginnings. When they send something like this home as the “rule” your kid has chosen to impose on himself, you know you’re doing something right!
This interactive graph allows you to enter your monthly, pre-tax wage then see where you fit against the average wage for your country and other countries around the world.
Pretty sobering to see that Shea’s and my current wages put us both above the highest per capita earners in the world (Luxembourg) and makes you appreciate the accident of birth that saw us born in a well-developed, progressive, (mostly) democratic nation where, within a couple generations, the grandchildren of dirt poor farmers can become highly educated, highly paid professionals.
It also brings home the point (which sounds like it was created by the mega-wealthy to counter-act the arguments of 99% protesters but has actually been put to great effect by charities supporting developing nations) that, on a global scale, pretty much everyone in the developed world is part of the 1%, no matter what you earn.
In fact, this book is my current read and it’s also extremely sobering from the opposite end of the spectrum in its description of slum dwellers in Mumbai who live in $0.35 per day that they earn recycling garbage.
(via Reddit)
The Leader Post recently featured a revealing article about Regina lawyer, activist and federal NDP candidate, Noah Evanchuk (I’d link to the Wikipedia page I created about him but the bastards at Wikipedia think that being a candidate in a federal election isn’t enough to make you notable unless you win the election. Stupid, made even more evident that the Green Party candidate in the same election *does* have a Wikipedia page which was allowed to stand because she was the Leader of the provincial party – even though the party is *much* smaller than the federal NDP and she, herself, got less than a tenth of the votes Evanchuk got.)
Anyhow, there’s a certain level of irony (in the Alanis Morrisette sense of the word) that Noah, who lost his brother to suicide, ran in Palliser, a riding that was previously held by Dave Batters (who helpfully does have a Wikipedia page), who also committed suicide after a long battle with mental illness.
It’s an extremely delicate line between being completely open & transparent and being opportunistic, especially around such a tragic circumstance. But I wonder if the election, which Noah lost by only 800 votes, may have gone differently if people in that riding knew about this unlikely connection between these two seemingly opposite politicians – Batters who served until mental illness took him away and Evanchuk who has dedicated his life to addressing mental health issues because of his own personal experience with the issue.
At any rate, kudos to Noah for speaking out on the issue.
So it’s not a secret that a big part of the booming Saskatchewan economy is due to our massive non-renewable sector – potash and oil mainly but also natural gas and other similar resources at the expense of developing the renewable industry in any meaningful fashion.
When we say “renewables”, most people think of things like solar, wind, hydro and the like. But there are also other renewable industries that can continually generate new, saleable products for the world market year after year. Agriculture is the most obvious example but there are also the cultural industries – books, music, visual art and movies.
So it was a massive shock to many in the province, in the national media as well as some pretty big names in Hollywood when the latest provincial budget included the elimination of the extremely common, popular and useful Saskatchewan Film Employment Tax Credit.
(As an aside, some genius on Twitter tried to claim that “The Hunger Games” didn’t need tax credits and it was a monster smash…except they were wrong and that blockbuster got its tax credit in North Carolina, just as it would’ve in pretty much any jurisdiction in North America.)
The justification for cutting the SFETC, directly from the Premier’s Twitter account, was that the film industry was in need of perpetual subsidy so that wasn’t good business – but that line of reasoning was disingenuous at best when every other major Saskatchewan sector also receives incentives of one kind or another.
There’s also the strange math of saying that cutting the SFETC saves $8 million a year – both because that’s a drop in the bucket in a multi-billion dollar provincial budget and also, another piece of disingenuous language since a tax credit isn’t money saved because it’s not money the provincial would’ve collected anyhow (and are now much less likely to collect *any* tax revenue from film productions directly or indirectly which, industry stats show, actually bring in $6 for every $1 invested via the tax credit.)
The SFETC is not a grant. It is a business incentive designed to reward businesses for bringing investment into Saskatchewan.
Further to that producers include the tax credit in the financing structure of the individual productions so that money is spent directly in Saskatchewan not put in the producers pockets.
And a final point the supposed money that the government will save by eliminating this credit is a myth. There will be no savings because those tax dollars are earned directly off of the money brought into Saskatchewan by producers using the Tax Credit.
Finally, there’s the impact this will have, not only on the 1200 people directly employed by the industry but the many economic spin-offs across the province in all sectors that come from the industry – often in the rural ridings that are the core of Wall’s support (the tax credit is structured so that companies get a higher rate if they shoot a certain distance from major centres – which is how Jennifer Jason Leigh and Drew Barrymore came to be shooting a film in my hometown along with other productions including “Little Mosque on the Prairie” and more.)
Perhaps it’s not that Brad Wall hates renewables. Perhaps he’s simply on a mission to destroy any decent program the NDP put in place, logic and business sense be damned.
I’ve got a personal dog in this fight.
One of the half dozen majors I declared during my first year was Film. Through that (and living in dorms) many of the people I hung out with in undergrad twenty years ago were film majors – and most of those people are still in Saskatchewan. When I went on exchange to England, two of the three courses I took during my semester abroad were film related (and a third on creative writing was indirectly related to film.) When the contract for my first “real job” out of University ran out, I got some temp work in the offices of the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Industry Association (SMPIA) where I got to know even more people from the filmmaking community, learn about the issues and see directly the impact these folks had on our province.
(Another aside – Brad Wall should realise that picking a fight with people who make their living dealing in media and storytelling is a bad idea – especially if the people defending you definitely *don’t* have those types of skills!)
To end, I’ll mention one last thing. I have lots of little theories about life, the universe and everything.
And one of those theories is that the current Sask-a-boom didn’t start when oil prices started going through the roof in the mid-2000’s. Or when the Sask Party got elected in 2007. Or when the Riders won the Grey Cup, also in that same year. I think the current boom was in large part inspired by the success of “Corner Gas” which debuted way back in 2004.
Think about it – the first hit Canadian sitcom in forever is set in…Dog River, Saskatchewan? And it’s a hit all across Canada? Suddenly people in this province had an excuse to have a bit of a swagger in their walk, a bit of pride in their talk in a way they never had before. As much as the show made fun of our quirks, it also allowed us to be proud of those quirks. And that was because of the reach and impact of the film industry. Even a jackass knows that!
And now, any Corner Gas reunion movie is much less likely to be shot in Saskatchewan.
I’ll end with one last thing – I’m not sure if it helps but it can’t hurt – please sign the online petition against the cuts to the film tax credit.
A number of Canadian libraries were selected for the ALA’s design showcase highlighting diverse areas of excellence including Youth Spaces, Green Facilities, Collaborative Learning and more.
