Canadian dairy is not a sacred cow

It's looking increasingly likely that Canada will have to abandon its perennially contentious supply management system for its dairy trade if it wants to cut any kind of reasonable deal in the NAFTA renegotiation. I have gone into the subject in some detail in the past, and concluded that the system is probably unjustifiable, and that abandoning it would not be the end of the world for Canada or even for its farmers.

The issue continues to be highly divisive, though, and not even necessarily along party lines. Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard is an example of the-sky-is-falling persuasion, as he warns, nay, almost threatens, Justin Trudeau that any move to leave behind supply management would be political suicide ("serious political consequences"), at least in the dairy-heavy province of Quebec. Actually, there are only 11,000 dairy farms in the whole of Canada, and these are split between many different electoral ridings, so this particular warning seems overblown at best. It should also be remembered that the dairy industry represents just a tiny proportion of our overall trade mix, a $6 billion industry of which just $150 million goes in exports to the USA (we already import about $470 million in dairy products from the US).

But an increasing number of articles (this one in the Globe and Mail, and this one in Macleans, being just two among many) are also concluding that maybe the time has come, and that the Canadian dairy industry's multi-decade free ride has run its course, and that, actually, that may not be such a bad thing.

Among other benefits of abandoning supply management are: the fact that Canada's terminally inefficient dairy sector will finally have to shape up and look for efficiencies as the competition breathes down their necks; lower prices for Canadian consumers of dairy products, especially the poor, who spend a disproportionate percentage of their incomes on food (the Canada West Foundation estimates that the system costs the average Canadian family about $600 a year, and another study estimates that poorer families are paying $339 a year more because of supply management); and, oh, just in passing, it might just get us a renegotiation of NAFTA and avoid 25% tariffs on auto exports among many other bad things.

So, Philippe Couillard's warnings notwithstanding, I think we could quite easily conscience an end to dairy supply management in the interests of the greater good. And we might even reap substantial local benefits at the same time. Other big dairy producers and exporters like Australia and New Zealand have shown that a supply management system is not a necessary part of a thriving dairy industry, and there is no reason why Canada cannot join them. If deemed necessary, a temporary compensation system for dairy producers could be introduced, in order to ensure an orderly transition. But it can be done. Dairy production is not an untouchable sacred cow.

US Open's sexist code violation umpire put firmly in his place

It seems kind of ridiculous that, in this day and age, female tennis players can be given a code violation for changing their shirts on court. And, indeed, when Frenchwoman Alize Cornet did so at the US Open this week, after realizing she had her top on back-to-front after a change during a heat break, there was a great outcry of "sexism!" The competition's management later issued a public clarification to the effect that the code violation decision was wrong and that women are in fact allowed to change their shirts on court, just the same as men are. The World Tennis Association also slammed the decision, saying that changing shirts on court is not against any WTA rules as there ARE no rules on that, either for men or for women.
So, in the end, no fine was levied, and Ms. Cornet went on to win the match. However, it still begs the question of what the chair umpire - let's name hin: Christian Rask of Denmark - was thinking in issuing a code violation in the first place. Shouldn't HE be issued a fine?

Kanye West belatedly apologizes for his slavery comments

Kanye West has finally got around to apologizing for his comments about slavery earlier this summer, when he called blacks' submission to slavery "for 400 years" something that sounds like "a choice".
The comments, in an interview with TMZ in May of this year, created quite a stir, but the notoriously Trump-loving rap star did not retract them. West also suffers from bipolar disorder, and that was his main excuse in apologizing for the outburst. It seems he has realized that his comments may be alienating the fee-paying public, so he has decided to make a public apology.

Pension changes the only issue that threatens Russia's love affair with Putin

Russia's a funny place. Throughout all the iffy machinations that Vladimir Putin has take the country through in recent years - from invasions of neighbouring countries to expanding his nuclear arsenal to severely curtailing the free press to political assassination attempts and imprisonments - the Russian public has remained reasonably equanimous, with just the odd protest or demonstration, swiftly quelled. Throughout it all, Putin's popularity had remained unconscionably high, at around 80% plus.
Then he decides to increase the retirement/pension age and all hell is let loose. To help an economy that has been sputtering for some years now, and to cut back on government expenditure the country can ill afford to maintain, he proposed increasing the retirement age from 60 to 65 for men and from 55 to 63 for women, closer to the levels of most of the rest of the world, but something he once vowed never to touch. This has let to widespread unrest, and a huge hit to Putin's personal popularity rating, from 80% to 67% in just a few short months. Polls show some 90% of the population oppose the cost-cutting moves. Putin has since had to scale back his plans in order to placate the irate populace.
And THIS is the issue that finally gets the Russian people off their fat arses to challen? I'm almost tempted to quote Donald Trump: "Sad!"

Beware, that fish you ordered could be absolutely anything

I don't eat fish - I've been vegetarian for the last 35 years or so - but I'm beginning to be quite thankful for that.

A study by advocacy group Oceana Canada shows that fish sold in restaurants and grocery stores is quite likely to be mislabelled. The study looked at 382 samples of fish sold in 177 retailers and restaurants across Canada, and used DNA barcoding to determine the actual species of fish. Around 44% (so, almost half) of the fish were not actually what they purported to be. 52% of the samples from restaurants were mislabelled, while grocery stores and markets fared slightly better with just 22% of the samples incorrectly labelled. Some types of fish were much more likely to be mislabelled: 100% of snapper, yellowtail and butterfish; about 50% of seabass; and around 30% of cod, halibut, tuna and sole. Most often, the fish actually turned out to be much cheaper fish like escolar (the fish dubbed "the laxative of the sea), tilapia or Japanese amberback.

The study draws no conclusion about where the mislabelling occurs - whether at the level of the retailing restaurant or store, or at the wholesaler stage, or even on the actual fishing boats themselves (that would be my guess). But, either way, it seems like you eat fish at your peril - it could be absolutely anything!

How Trump hopes to control the WTO

If you had any doubts at all whether Donald Trump is against trade regulations in any shape or form, your doubts will have been definitively put to rest as he makes his move against the World Trade Organization (WTO) itself. Given that the USA is currently defending itself against a bunch of major WTO cases, including against Canada and China, this could be a big deal.

The WTO is the intergovernmental organization that has attempted to regulate international trade since its founding in 1995. It has 164 member countries, and 23 more with observer status. It is not a perfect organization, but it is the only body that is willing to put itself out there and mediate in some if the world's thorniest trade disputes. Frankly, it is the best we have.

Unfortunately, in recent months, the WTO finds itself in something of a parlous state. It nominally has seven appeal judges from various different parts of the world, but it is currently down to four, with one of those due to be re-appointed on September 30th. Since the start if his term of office, Trump has effectively blocked all appointments to the body as existing judges' terms come to an end. If he also blocks the appointment on September 30th, the chamber will be down to three, the minimum number required for the dispute-resolution system to function.

Trump maintains that the USA loses too many WTO appeals cases because other countries have most of the judges. "Not fair!", "Sad!", you know the kind of thing. Except that, as usual, he has all his facts wrong. The US has a similar, if not better, win-lose rate to other countries, and research shows that the US wins about 90% of the WTO cases in which it is the appellant, and loses about the same percentage when other bring cases against it. Also, the WTO appellate body has always had at least one American on it, which is more than any other country can say. So, if anything, the US is over-represented and overly successful.

One can only conclude that Trump is looking to reduce the chamber to a group of three that the American member can more effectively control. Fair? I'll leave you to decide.

 

UPDATE

In his usual throwaway style, Trump told Bloomberg news that he would happily just leave the WTO completely if the US doesn't win more cases: "If they don't shape up, I would withdraw from the WTO". He is particularly concerned about a Chinese WTO claim against the US after Trump imposed new tariffs on them. He might have added, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair".

US court rules that political gerrymandering is unconstitutional

In a landmark legal decision, a special group of three federal judges has ruled that the political boundaries within the state of North Carolina have been deliberately gerrymandered to the advantage of the Republican Party, and must be rectified, possibly before the upcoming November mid-terms. This comes after a similar case in Pennsylvania earlier this year which also ruled that Republican-gerrymandered districts needed to be rectified.

If you aren't sure, gerrymandering is the practice of rigging the boundaries of political jurisdictions in order to strengthen the electoral propects of particular political parties, a practice that goes back at least to the 18th century. American electoral districts are notoriously gerrymandered, but a couple of legal cases before this one, one in Wisconsin and one in Maryland, were both thrown out on technicalities before a decision could be made.

The North Carolina case is even more egregious than those, though, and one Republican member of the the North Carolina General Assembly is on public record as saying, when the state's electoral districts were redrawn in 2016, just before the Federal election: "I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats, so I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country ... I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats, because I do not believe it is possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats". Wow! It doesn't get much clearer than that.

As it turns out, North Carolina did indeed vote in exactly 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats in 2016, despite the Republicans only receiving 53% of the popular vote, providing an eye-popping example of just how effective - and how exact a science - gerrymandering is. The partisan map-drawing of this single state had a direct influence over granting Donald Trump a small majority in the House of Representatives. With the Supreme Court as a whole still with just 8 members, 4 Republicans and 4 Democrats, the lower court's ruling is unlikely to be overruled, and North Carolina's gerrymandering will need to be addressed before the November mid-term elections. As a result, the Democrats may have a much better chance of winning back the House this November.

I'm sure that both the Reublicans and the Democrats are guilty of gerrymandering in different states and at different times, just one example of how the victors can rewrite history. But this one case can hopefully help to redress the imbalance and the political machinations that go on behind the scenes of US elections, and it will almost certainly have wider national implications. Given that the USA is clearly not moving towards a system of proportional representation any time soon, that's probably the best we can hope for.

Why is the hash or number sign also called the pound sign?

The hash sign # is absolutely ubiquitous these days, what with Twitter hashtags being bandied around with gay abandon. But have you ever wondered why it is also called the "pound" sign?

It usually gets that name - at least in North America; it is never called that in Britain - when used in the context of a phone keypad, as in "Press the pound sign to return to the previous menu" in those interminable phone menu systems. Funnily enough, when the symbol was first added to a phone keypad, by Bell back in the 1960s, it had a perfectly good name of its own: the "octothorpe" ("octo" for the eight points of the symbol, and "thorpe" for, well, no-one's quite sure about that). But apparently that name just never took off, and it became known as the "pound sign".

Why? Well, that's also not clear. The theory is that, back in the day, the abbreviation for a pound in weight, "lb" (after libra pondo, literally "pound by weight" in Latin), was often crossed like a "t" by bookkeepers and scribes, so that it kind of looks a bit like the # symbol, and that the symbol was therefore often used instead of "lb".

Well, no, actually, a crossed "lb" doesn't look like the # symbol actually, but so goes the theory, which I have seen propounded in many places. Personally, I find this explanation singularly unconvincing, as, apparently, do others.

Another, almost equally unconvincing, theory revolves around the idea that the shift symbol on the number 3 on a British typewriter was the £ (pound) symbol. On American typewriters, this was replaced by the more useful # symbol. This may be true, but still does not explain why the different symbol also came to be called "pound".

Of course, the symbol also masquerades under a variety of other names and has a wild variety of uses:

• "hash" - this usage in computing arose in the 1970s, possibly as a bastardization of "hatch", and it has various computer usages in different programming languages. It has more recently become ubiquitous through the use of Twitter "hashtags".
• "comment" - a secondary use in computing to mean that the line following the symbol is to be read as an explanatory comment and not as an instruction within the program.
• "number" - to indicate ordinal numbers, as in "#2 pencil" or "cell block #9", a common-sense name that arose in Britain in order to avoid confusion with the British currency symbol (pound sterling).
• "sharp" - an italicized version of # used in musical notation for centuries to mean "make the note a halftone higher".
• "space" - used in copy editing to mean "insert a space between these words or sentences".
• "equal and parallel" - a symbol used in mathematics and geometry. The symbol also has other uses in mathematics, including the cardinality of sets in set theory, the connected sum of manifolds in topology; the primorial function in number theory, etc.
• it also has several other, less official names, including "square", "gate", "crunch, "tic-tac-toe", etc.