European electric cars now need to be noisy too

The EU, which purports to be strongly in favour of the increased adoption of electric cars as a means of fighting climate change, has just put one more barrier in the way of the increased adoption of electric cars by ruling that all new electric vehicles have to have a "noise-emitting device", which sounds like a traditional gasoline engine, i.e. noisy. Existing vehicles are to be gradually retrofitted with noise-makers by 2021. (The USA finally passed a similar law in 2018, after several delays, which is to come into full force by September 2020. Canada is still thinking about it.)

One of the many advantages of electric cars is that they are quiet. Modern life is already way too noisy, and anything that can be done to reduce the ambient noise we are all subjected to is most welcome. So, it seems an awful shame that such a law is considered necessary, but the impetus has come from charities like Guide Dogs for the Blind, which complain that the blind and the visually-impaired may be surprised by quiet electric vehicles, especially when reversing. The new EU law mandates an acoustic vehicle alert system (AVAS) on all new electric vehicles for when they are travelling at less than 20 km/h or reversing, supposedly the times when cars are most likely to put pedestrians at risk. You can hear an example here (and yes, it's horrible). At higher speeds, the noise of the tires on the road and the aerodynamic noise of the moving car is apparently sufficient, although some of the charities are calling for electric vehicles to make a sound at all speeds.

I do understand the reason for the law, although you can tie yourself in knots over arguments about how many people are affected, whether people have a right to a quieter environment, and whether more people have been hurt as a result of quiet electric cars (even that is not definitively proven: for example, a US Dept. of Transportation report suggest that hybrids and EVs are 35% more likely to cause pedestrian injuries, but other reports note that overall pedestrian deaths continue to decrease even as EVs become more popular). The irony is that some other non-electric cars are just about as quiet nowadays, and this is increasingly a goal of many car manufacturers.

I must confess I had high hopes for quieter cities running silent electric cars and trucks one day, but that day may be further off than I thought. What a shame.

 

It's ironic that it is down to the courts to rein in Trump's excesses

The USA is in the rather ridiculous and unfortunate position of relying on the unelected courts to guard against some of Donald Trump's more extreme decisions. A federal judge has just blocked Trump's use of billions in military funds to build a wall on the Mexican border.

But this is just the latest of many occasions where the courts have been the fall-back option, where the Democrat majority in the House of Representatives is just not able to have any say on the random decisions coming out of the White House (other recent examples are the court blocking of Trump's controversial citizenship question for the 2020 census, and the move by US asylum officers to use the courts to put an end to Trump's "Remain in Mexico" policy for asylum-seekers). This is mainly because the US political system gives the President so much power to hand down edicts that never get discussed or debated by the country's elected representatives. Some of those decisions are just so extreme as to be illegal or unconstitutional, though, and the legal system can step in and overrule them.

I suppose we should be grateful that such checks and balances exist. But it is ironic that the country has to rely on unelected court officers to rein in a President gone berserk with power.

How can bribes from Big Pharma be legal?

I still maintain it is an absolute scandal that Big Pharma pays big bucks to doctors and hospitals as sweeteners (read: bribes) to encourage them to prescribe their drugs. How can that even be legal?
The latest figures show that the 10 largest offenders paid out a total of $76 million to Canadian doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers in the last year (2018), marginally up from the previous year, with the largest sums coming from Abbvie, Novartis, Amgen, Roche and Merck (but they all do it). Now, it's good that the companies voluntarily disclose this information now - more than they used to do. But shouldn't we be doing something about it, like stopping them, for instance. I'm sure this wouldn't be allowed in other sector of industry. Can you imagine the outcry if the steel industry did this, or the telecom industry. How, then, can the pharmaceutical industry get away with it?

Federal Liberals 2 : Conservative Premiers 0, on carbon taxes

Sorry, Mr. Ford, but the courts have ruled that the federal carbon tax is actually totally legal. In fact, the Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled that it is not a tax at all, but a "regulatory charge" for the entirely reasonable and necessary purpose of reducing the deleterious effects of climate change. And it is anyway a perfectly legitimate levy for a federal government to be imposing for the common good, and in no way in contravention of the Charter rights of Canadians, not does it intrude on provincial jurisdictions. So there.
This comes after a Saskatchewan court ruled the same thing a month or two ago. So, Federal Liberals 2 : Conservative Premiers 0. And in a federal election year too! Now, can we please stop spending taxpayers' money on spurious court cases, and get on with the matter in hand?

Trump's Palestinian "deal of the century" tone deaf and doomed to fail

As someone who claims to be all about "deals", Donald Trump seems to have very little idea about which deals are likely to be acceptable and which not.
Letting his son-in-law Jared Kushner loose on as thorny an issue as Arab-Israeli relations seemed like a bad idea to most observers in the first place. His reputation hovers barely above the level of "bit of an idiot". When he started calling his plan (his? Trump's?) the "deal of the century", with typical Trumpian swagger, most people just rolled their eyes. But, hey, give the guy a chance, I guess, you never know. Pretty much everybody else, including men and women with much greater diplomatic reputations than Trump or Kushner, have had a go at it and failed, but you never know.
The "deal of the century", though, was a spectacular bust. Palestine didn't even attend the conference in Bahrain but, when you consider the Trump administration's recent actions towards them - withdrawing humanitarian aid funding, shutting down its missions in the West Bank and Gaza, ejecting Palestinian diplomats from Washington, opening up its Israeli embassy in contested Jerusalem, and its unalloyed support for anything Israeli - you can see why they might have been a little cynical.
The deal itself? An offer of $50 billion as a kind of start-up fund for Palestinians in the region. So, not really a deal at all, more of a bribe, with no mention of a political agenda, a two-state solution, illegal Israeli settlements, or any of those kind of tedious details. It was, unsurprisingly, rejected out of hand by Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, and, as I mentioned, Palestine had no intentions of even considering it.
Now, $50 billion dollars is a lot of money, but money - which is really all Trump & Co really understand, if indeed they can be said to understand that much - is entirely redundant without a political settlement. As a senior PLO representative opined, "It is totally divorced from reality. The elephant in the room is the occupation itself." Even Tony Blair deadpanned, "It is absolutely foolish to believe you can have economics without sound politics". Pretty obvious really.
The "deal" was tone deaf, and dead in the water before it even started. I could have saved Mr. Kushner the airfare if he had asked. But no doubt Trump will spin even this in a positive light, claiming that they tried in good faith, but the Palestinians are just not interested in a solution. Even in the "deal of the century".

Drone technology in the hands of terrorists is a bleak prospect

The Economist has put some flesh on thoughts I had myself after the drone sightings that shut down Gatwick Airport this Christmas. I, and probably many others, wondered why more drones had not been used for terrorist attacks. The Economist article suggest that this may well change soon - they are predicting that drone disruption may be on the cards for the upcoming Extinction Rebellion climate change protests, for example - and that, even more worryingly, there is very little that can be done about it.
An estimated 235 diferent counter-drone systems are commercially available or under development, ranging from radio jamming to electronic hijacking to nets to projectile to even trained eagles. But there are a much more limited number of options available in a crowded and very public space like a major airport. To make matters worse, modern drones are much more nimble and fast than they used to be, reaching speeds of up to 260 km/h, and can even be pre-programmed to follow a set path, obviating the need for disruptable electronic communications. Adaptations and add-ons developed by hobbyists are legion and almost impossible to predict, including graffiti sprays, grabbing claws, firework launchers, flame-throwers, tasers, handguns, even chainsaws. The relatively low cost of drones also means that they can be employed in numbers, possibly larger numbers than counter-measures can deal with.
All in all, it doesn't really bear thinking about.

Claims that music study makes you smart remain unconvincing

I take the latest claims that music study gives students an academic boost with the same pinch of salt with which I have accompanied previous claims.
A new study, published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Educational Psychology this week, looks at public school students in British Columbia, and concludes that those kids who took musical instrument classes for several years had higher grades in math, science and English by the time of Grades 10-12.
I don't doubt that that was in fact the case. What I take issue with is the conclusions drawn from it. The study suggests a causal relationship that I find difficult to justify. One needs only look back to an earlier study by University of Toronto professor Glenn Schellenberg in 2004, which is often cited as proof of the same causal relationship. However, since that study was published, Prof. Schellenberg has renounced his conclusions, arguing that it is much more likely that pre-existing differences in the students' personalities and abilities (not to mention their parental support/pressure) explain why music students and non-music students perform differently in school. Basically, bright and engaged students are more likely to engage in music studies; it is not the music that is somehow, miraculously, making them smart, a notion that Prof. Schellenberg calls "just ridiculous".
The newer study claims to make some attempt to control for variables like gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status and prior academic achievement, and various convincing-sounding hypotheses for the mechanisms by which music improves academic performance  have been out forward, but the conclusions are still widely disputed, and the hypotheses are just that, hypotheses. Me, I remain skeptical.

Sidewalk Labs' Quayside development may require too much of Toronto

Google affiliate Sidewalk Lab's proposed tech-heavy development of Toronto's Quayside area has been talked about for some years now, and most people still don't really have a clue about the practical implications of the project. Now, the company has issued a glossy four-volume 1,524-page development plan and, guess what, most people still don't really understand most of the practical implications of the project.
The tome waxes lyrical about small details like robotic trash cans, automated rotating rain-shields, self-driven small package delivery, adaptive traffic lights and speed limits, and dynamic configurable road widths. But it is still far from clear how Sidewalk Labs intends to use all the data it proposes to collect from residents and users, how it intends to get over the fact that the "mass timber" high-rise buildings it proposes are not currently legal in Canada, and how the plan is actually going to help housing affordability in Toronto as it claims (it uses a very different, and much broader, definition of "affordable" than the City of Toronto does). Indeed, the Master Innovation and Development Plan raises almost as many questions as it answers.
The planned development was originally to cover a relatively modest area of 12 acres in Quayside in Toronto's underutilized and undeveloped old portlands area, near the mouth of the Don River. But the report says that it is now to include the western half of Villiers Island as well, and it also raises the prospect of the partial development of a much larger area around it, as it now says it will need a much larger parcel of land (up to 190 acres, which Sidewalk Labs cutely refers to as the Innovative Development and Economic Acceleration district, or IDEA) in order to fully implement all the innovations and sensor-testing technology it proposes, land that I had understood was already part of the city's plan for the naturalization and flood-proofing of the Don estuary. Some of the land in question is owned by Waterfront Toronto, the intergovernmental body that is tasked with dealing with Sidewalk Labs and making the final decision, but some of it is owned directly by the City of Toronto, which complicates matters somewhat.
The proposal would also require substantial regulatory and legal changes at the municipal and provincial level, including amendments to the City of Toronto Act and the Ontario Highway Traffic Act. It would require new public transit (light rail), for which Sidewalk Labs graciously offers between $100 million and $400 million in loans towards the $1.2 billion total cost. Sidewalk Labs is offering the city a 10% share of profits from any new technologies it develops there over 10 years (if any), but it also calls for vaguely-defined "performance payments" from the city in return. Who knows what this will mean in practice? Indeed, the entire price tag for the project - and who would be responsible for what - remains worryingly undefined ("subject to future negotiations"). Make no mistake: Sidewalk Labs and it's parent, Alphabet Inc, are in this to make a profit (the development plan admits as much), not just to further its R&D, and definitely not for the social and economic welfare of the people of Toronto.
Now, I am not a technophobe - I have solar panels and a Prius and any number of apps on my cellphone - but I don't believe in adopting technologies willy-nilly, just because they are there (see my piece on 5G phone technology). We don't want to go selling our municipal soul for the promise of robotic trash cans, or even for some ill-defined possible boon to be acquired from a reputation as a tech-forward city (I don't drink Richard Florida's Cool-Aid, when he claims that the Sidewalk Labs project would automatically vault Toronto to the top of the urban tech charts, and that huge economic benefits will necessarily follow; I think it is Alphabet Inc. that will benefit and Toronto may pick up a few crumbs along the way).
I also believe that urban planning is the province of elected city officials and city departments established for that very purpose, not some faceless mega-corporation whose goals and ambitions may be a long way from those of the city and its residents. That sounds to me like the thin end of the wedge, the start of the slippery slope towards a dystopian future where we are all just pawns in a world of corporate powerplays. Hyperbole? Maybe. People may accuse me of not having enough "vision" (that is the usual come-back), but I'd prefer that to being considered recklessly speculative. What's so "smart" about that?
In a pro-Sidewalk Labs article, Globe reporter Marcus Gee complains that, "In the jaded eyes of its opponents, Sidewalk is a free-booting tech giant that threatens to steal our personal data, gobble up our most precious real estate and supersede our elected governments, making itself lord and master of the waterfront". Well, yes, that just about sums it up, and Mr. Gee does not provide much evidence or argument to refute that characterization of the project.