Toronto mayor Rob Ford has dropped out of the race for re-election. His brother Doug has taken up the mantle. A local Toronto paper says this is so Doug can discover he can't win an election:
With just over a month to go before the municipal election, Rob Ford’s mysterious abdominal tumour, which was addressed last night at Mount Sinai hospital by colorectal cancer expert Dr. Zane Cohen, has forced the crack-smoking mayor of Toronto into a hospital bed for further testing. As a result of this medical emergency, Rob Ford’s brother, a kickboxing black-belt holder by the name of Doug Ford, has taken the reigns of Robbie’s campaign and will aim to extend the rich legacy of a Ford-run Toronto into 2018
Doug will have a tough job teaching Toronto how to Dougie (fingers crossed he uses the Cali Swag District song as his campaign theme) when the city has become so accustomed to the aggressive foibles of his brother Rob. He will also need to get some A-list talent on his side, given that Rob has garnered the support of such non-controversial figures as Mike Tyson and Don Cherry. Doug also does not have the late night talk show experience that Rob has, nor has he bro’d down with the people in the same way that his crack smoking, racist brother has been able to capture the hearts and minds of about 28 percent of Toronto’s voting block. In fact, Doug Ford mainly seems to be really, really pissed off a lot of the time.
We knew this would happen someday, but it's still sad to see Rob Ford roll off the Canadian stage. Toronto won't be the same without him, which entire neighborhoods there are happy about.
A week from today, part of a 400-year-old country may elect to secede:
YouGov’s latest survey has No, on 52%, narrowly ahead of Yes, 48%, after excluding don’t knows. This is the first time No has gained ground since early August. Three previous polls over the past month had recorded successive four point increases in backing for independence. In early August Yes support stood at 39%; by last weekend it had climbed to 51%.
Just one week ago, Scots divided evenly on whether their country would be better or worse off.
Yes, for those of you not paying attention to the Ancestral Homeland, next Thursday Scotland will hold a referendum on remaining in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
If the referendum succeeds, it will set in motion a series of steps that could have Scotland become an independent nation within the EU by 2020. If this sounds like a bad idea to you, you're not alone. The economics are horrible, and that's even before figuring out whether Scotland will remain on Sterling. Never mind things like nuclear armaments, North Sea oil fields, and the fact that 400,000 English live in Scotland and a whopping 600,000 Scots live in England.
The Daily Parker votes No. My ancestors came down with James VI. The Union has always been stronger together.
From my first trip to New York, August 1984:
The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates spent seven weeks this summer at an immersion French course at Middlebury College:
I was there to improve my French. My study consisted of four hours of class work and four hours of homework. I was forbidden from reading, writing, speaking, or hearing English. I watched films in French, tried to read a story in Le Monde each day, listened to RFI and a lot of Barbara and Karim Oullet. At every meal I spoke French, and over the course of the seven weeks I felt myself gradually losing touch with the broader world. This was not a wholly unpleasant feeling. In the moments I had to speak English (calling my wife, interacting with folks in town or at the book store), my mouth felt alien and my ear slightly off.
he majority of people I interacted with spoke better, wrote better, read better, and heard better than me. There was no escape from my ineptitude. At every waking hour, someone said something to me that I did not understand. At every waking hour, I mangled some poor Frenchman’s lovely language. For the entire summer, I lived by two words: “Désolé, encore.”
From this he examines scholastic opportunity and achievement, how different ethnic groups approach intellectuals in their midst, and class conflict in general, as only Coates can. It's a good read.
On those rare occasions when I opt for it, I usually enjoy having in-flight WiFi. At this particular moment, however, I'm staring down another two hours of flying time with WiFi throughput under 200 kbps. That speed reminds me of the late 1990s. You know, half the Web ago.
This is painful. I'm not streaming video, nor am I connected to a remote server like the guy next to me. I'm just trying to get some documents written. I believe I will have to write a complaint to GoGo Inflight, as this throughput is completely unacceptable.
But enough about that minor sadness; I've found something truly horrible.
Everyone who took English 1 at my college had to read George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. (I would actually extend this mandate to everyone on the planet who speaks English if I had the power.) In the essay, Orwell calls out a specific passage from Ecclesiastes to show how business English can destroy thought:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
He renders it in modern English thus:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Two things. First, "modern" English in 1946 seems a lot like modern English in 2014. Frighteningly so.
Second, there are worse translations of that passage in actual, printed Bibles. Now, I'm not a religious person, as even a causal reader of this blog knows. But I have an appreciation for language. So it pains me to see that some people learned Ecclesiastes 9:11 like this:
I saw something else under the sun. The race isn't [won] by fast runners, or the battle by heroes. Wise people don't necessarily have food. Intelligent people don't necessarily have riches, and skilled people don't necessarily receive special treatment. But time and unpredictable events overtake all of them.
("GOD'S WORD® Translation")
Or this:
I have observed something else under the sun. The fastest runner doesn't always win the race, and the strongest warrior doesn't always win the battle. The wise sometimes go hungry, and the skillful are not necessarily wealthy. And those who are educated don't always lead successful lives. It is all decided by chance, by being in the right place at the right time.
NO! No, no, NO! This isn't a children's book. Why does anyone need to dumb it down? I mean, fine, vernacular and all, but can't we at least keep the poetry?
It's no wonder the religious right have such poor cognitive skills. The one book they were allowed to read as children has been reduced to pabulum.
Someimes—rarely—I disconnect for a couple of days. This past weekend I basically just hung out, walked my dog, went shopping, and had a perfectly nice absence from the Web.
Unfortunately that meant I had something like 200 RSS articles to plough through, and I just couldn't bring myself to stop dealing with (most) emails. And I have a few articles to read:
Now back to your regularly-scheduled week, already in progress...
Philip Shorer on the Atlantic's CityLab blog argues for a 4-day work week:
Beyond working more efficiently, a four-day workweek appears to improve morale and well-being. The president of the UK Faculty of Public Health told the Daily Mail that a four-day workweek could help lower blood pressure and increase mental health among employees. Jay Love of Slingshot SEO saw his employee-retention rate shoot up when he phased in three-day weekends. Following this line of thought, TreeHouse, an online education platform, implemented a four-day week to attract workers, which has contributed to the company's growth.
In this scenario, employees still work 40-hour weeks, but they do so over the course of four days rather than five. This arrangement still sounds sub-optimal, though, as working at full capacity for 10 hours is more demanding than doing so for eight. Despite that, the employees at Stephens’s company still preferred 40 hours in four days to 40 hours in five days. They might be even happier—and work even better—if they worked fewer hours in addition to fewer days.
Of course, counting travel, as a consultant I frequently do four 10-hour days followed by an 8-hour day. Cutting one of those out might be a good thing.
Two of my favorite authors, Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan, recently had a long phone conversation (which Harris transcribed) about Israel. I haven't finished reading it, but as I respect both men, I consider this a must-read.
Also, I'm back in Chicago, possibly for two whole weeks. That said, the Cleveland Client was pretty happy with our work and may move to the next phase, so I may be going back there soon.
He thinks we should all use GMT instead:
[W]ithin a given time zone, the point of a common time is not to force everyone to do everything at the same time. It's to allow us to communicate unambiguously with each other about when we are doing things.
If the whole world used a single GMT-based time, schedules would still vary. In general most people would sleep when it's dark out and work when it's light out. So at 23:00, most of London would be at home or in bed and most of Los Angeles would be at the office. But of course London's bartenders would probably be at work while some shift workers in LA would be grabbing a nap. The difference from today is that if you were putting together a London-LA conference call at 21:00 there'd be only one possible interpretation of the proposal. A flight that leaves New York at 14:00 and lands in Paris at 20:00 is a six-hour flight, with no need to keep track of time zones. If your appointment is in El Paso at 11:30 you don't need to remember that it's in a different time zone than the rest of Texas.
Sigh.
It's even easier to get people to use International System measurements than to get them to understand the arbitrariness of the clock, but let's unpack just one thing Yglesias seems to have missed: the date.
Imagine you actually can get people in Los Angeles to use UTC. Working hours are 16:00 to 24:00. School starts at 15:45 (instead of ending then). In the summer, the sun rises at 12:30 and sets at 02:00.
Wait, what? The sun sets at 2am? So...you come home on a different day? That makes no sense to most people.
Yes, in a world where people are unwilling to give up their 128-ounce gallons and 36-inch yards in favor of 1000-milliliter liters and 100-centimeter meters, a world where ice freezing at 32 and boiling at 212 makes more sense than freezing at 0 and boiling at 100, a world where Paul Ryan is thought to be a serious person, we're not moving away from the day changing while most people are asleep.
And don't even get me started on the difference between GMT and UTC.
Pilot and journalist James Fallows has an op-ed in today's New York Times explaining how MH17 was following the rules:
Before Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off on Thursday, its crew and dispatchers would have known that a few hours earlier Ukrainian authorities had prohibited flights at 32,000 feet and below across eastern parts of their country, “due to combat actions ... near the state border” with Russia, as the official notice put it, including the downing of a Ukrainian military transport plane earlier in the week.
Therefore when they crossed this zone at 33,000 feet, they were neither cutting it razor-close nor bending the rules, but doing what many other airlines had done, in a way they assumed was both legal and safe. Legal in much the way that driving 63 in a 65-mile-per-hour zone would be.
And safe, not just for regulatory reasons, but because aircraft at cruising altitude are beyond the reach of anything except strictly military antiaircraft equipment. During takeoff and landing, airliners are highly vulnerable: They are big, they are moving slowly and in a straight line, they are close to the ground. But while cruising, they are beyond most earthbound criminal or terrorist threats.
This is why, even during wartime, airliners have frequently flown across Iraq and Afghanistan. The restricted zone over Ukraine was meant to protect against accidental fire or collateral damage. It didn’t envision a military attack.
The rebels are reportedly blocking access to the crash site, while the Ukrainian government says it has proof Russia supplied the missile that killed 298 civilians.
And with two 777 hull losses in three months, Malaysia Airlines' future is in doubt.
The drumbeat continues.