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Council kills Collingwood construction

NoiseCollingwood council – dominated by The Block – has voted to cripple the booming construction industry in town. A bylaw passed this week prohibits, “…operation of construction equipment to Monday to Friday from 7 a.m., to 7 p.m.” according to a story in the Connection.*

This means The Block have really put a damper on construction, making it even more difficult for developers to get homes finished on time, hurting the workers who depend on those jobs, delaying new home buyers from moving in and creating yet another liability situation for the town.

The article notes:

This deals with major development, and equipment used in connection with construction projects on developments not assumed by the town, or on property where site plan development was approved.
Residential construction, such as building a deck, is limited from 7 a.m., to 7 p.m., Monday to Friday and 8 a.m., to 4 p.m., on Saturday. This construction would be prohibited on Sunday and holidays.**

So it’s okay to build a deck, run a noisy lawnmower, leaf blower (a particularly annoying offender) or a chainsaw in your backyard, but not run a quieter backhoe or grader. Apparently to The Block a homebuilt deck or a leafless walkway is so much more important to the local economy than, say, a 100-home residential development that provides a few hundred jobs.

This comes from the same people who didn’t know what a dividend was,  said comparing equivalent municipal jobs with the same titles was apples and oranges, and didn’t understand that a levy on property tax is still a tax increase. Even simple economics escapes their grasp.

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The costs of the Block’s conspiracy theory

Wasting our money$6.2 million. That’s how much it cost Mississauga to have a judicial inquiry into its utility Enersource, back in 2011. That inquiry was initially estimated to cost $2 million but the costs more than tripled, according to a story in The Connection.

Imagine what The Block’s judicial inquiry is going to cost us in Collingwood. Millions and millions more.

They’ve already admitted it will cost taxpayers around $2 million. But none of them have even the slightest idea of what’s involved, who has to be called, who pays what, or what the process is. They just swallowed the bait on the hook of the lawyer hired by the former interim CAO without hesitation. But then, none of them care about the costs because it will have to be paid next term, by a whole new council since no one in their right minds would re-elect a single one of this corrupt lot.

After all, it feeds their conspiracy theory – and like all such conspiracies is based on wild, alt-fact imagination rather than anything resembling truth. But it also helps them pursue their vendettas against former council and staff for not building the $35 million Taj Mahal for the Y at public expense. (Remember: some of these are the same people who cooked up the phony OPP investigation that found nothing wrong in five years – but still cost Ontario taxpayers millions to run).

The Mississauga inquiry interviewed nearly 100 people and collected about 35,000 documents and held hearings where 35 people testified over a period of 38 days. And cost the city $6.2 million.

Collingwood’s inquiry is going to be remarkably similar. At least 100 people were involved in the original share sale, including former councillors and many staff from Collingwood, former board members and staff of Collus and PowerStream, lawyers from municipalities and utilities, current Alectra staff and board, the KPMG’s consultant, auditors, the councils and staff of the three Ontario municipalities that were shareholders in PowerStream who approved the sale, our former CAO, our former interim CAO, reporters who covered the public events in local media, PLUS officials and staff at the Ontario Energy Board and Energy Probe who investigated and approved the deal. And some of the current council will be interviewed, too.

PLUS the town will have to pay the costs of lawyers, auditors and accountants who get called (and likely those of people who come from outside the community or interrupt their jobs to testify). There will be town staff who can’t do their work because they will be in interviews. There will be the costs to retrieve and print thousands of pages of documentation.

Thirty eight days of testimony? I doubt it will be any fewer for us here given the number of people involved in the decision last term. I have already spoken to a half-dozen people who are preparing thick dossiers and their paperwork, each of whom will have 100 or more pages of factual documentation and reports to present (my blog posts about Collus are at least that long!). I suspect our own inquiry will require 40 or more days.

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More rapture, less reality

The end? According to some, the rapture is coming again, April 23. I’m so tired of this event. I’m still cleaning up after the last rapture. And the one before that. And the one before that, and before that, and before that… it’s even more frequent than an annual event. But next week it’ll come again. the whole shebang: Christians rising from the dead, the messiah prancing about, angels flitting about like birds, the confetti, the glitter, champagne corks and party balloons all over the place. Raptures are always such a mess.

Seriously. April 23, according to a report on Faux News. Sure, Faux News has almost as much credibility as any supermarket tabloid, but they wouldn’t lie, would they? (insert gales of laughter soundtrack). But according to a piece on Patheos, that’s just what Faux predicts: the rapture.

And like all alt-facts, fake news and other codswallop Faux spews, the story got picked up by media and the many wingnut websites, and soon spread around the fields of the internet like the manure it is. Which of course sparks the inevitable cycle of debunking and ridicule (these hoaxes are called viral for a reason: they are an intellectual disease).

This is good for David Meade, because it fuels his book sales about the end of times and Planet X (although whether the ignorati actually read their purchase is anyone’s guess – and why write anything if the world’s going to end?). It’s truly a sad comment that anyone credible feels the need to debunk such feather-brained codswallop, but I’m sure they are alarmed at how many people are gullible enough to fall for it. It and the many other woo hoo ideas, hoaxes, conspiracies, cons and scams online.

The hoax is fanned by the self-described “Christian numerologist” David Meade (a pen name for one of the internet’s uber-wingnut conspiracy theorists). But this is an oxymoron: Christians are forbidden from practicing witchcraft, and numerology is one of the things witches practice. But that doesn’t stop Meade, who has predicted this event several times in the past (September, October and then November last year; each one failing to occur).

Well, sure, witchcraft and numerology are puerile superstition, but that doesn’t mean they can’t find a comfort zone among the fringe Christian eschatologists or hoaxers like Meade when it suits their purposes (and sells their books). Being a “Christian numerologist” is one of those made-up job descriptions like nail technologist or dog chiropractor. Who will dispute your title?

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Of mice and men, and trackballs, too

All the mice tested
Top: Aukey, Steelcase (wired gaming). Bottom: Anker, EV, Logitech, Kensington (from the left, seen from the back)

Late last year, I purchased another laptop to separate my work and recreational uses. After a long search in stores, and a lot of online reading and comparing models, I decided to get an MSI gaming rig (an entry level in their pantheon, admittedly). That process got me thinking again about how we buy and sell computers.*

Computers are, for the most part, sold like muscle cars: what’s under the hood gets the attention. The processor, ram, speed, drive capacity all get writ large in ads and promoted in stores. But it’s all a bit misleading. For most uses – surfing the web, email, some word processing or spreadsheet work, non-graphics-intensive games, shopping on Amazon, that sort of thing – any modern computer or tablet will do. 

Today’s smart phones and tablets have bazillions more processing power in a single handheld device than a room full of bulky, freezer-sized IBM 360s had a few decades back. I ran games, word processors, spreadsheets and more on Atari and other eight-bit computers that couldn’t out-compute a modern digital watch, let alone an i3 laptop (and that’s a weak sibling to the i5 and i7). Those seemingly limited Chromebooks and bargain-priced laptops are really monsters of computing muscle compared to what we used only a couple of decades back.

Yes, the hardware specs matter if you have processor-heavy work such as graphic design, video or music editing, 3D animation or graphics-intensive gaming. But for the most part what should really matter when you’re choosing a computer are where you interact the most:  the input/output devices: the screen, the keyboard and the mouse/trackpad. That’s where you’ll spend the most time and get the most sensory response from.

All the mice tested
Top: Aukey, Steelcase (wired gaming). Bottom: Anker, EV, Logitech, Kensington (from the left, seen from the front)

I recently decided to change my mouse. Or mice, rather, since each laptop has its own. In part it’s because after many hours a day spent with one, my wrists and fingers can be tired and sore. I only use the inherent trackpads when I don’t have access to a mouse because I find them inefficient and clumsy.

Arm twistingI’ve favoured wired, gaming mice in the past for several reasons. First, a wired connection is consistent where a wireless might be susceptible to interference (and gaming mice have excellent but often long cables). Second, a gaming mouse usually has a lot more features than a regular mouse, including programmable buttons, more levels of speed and sensitivity. Third they offer better (longer lasting) buttons and scroll wheel, built for constant clicking and wheeling. And fourth, from long experience, I’ve learned not to buy the cheapest mice: they are generally less durable and less accurate than those from recognized companies.***

Traditional mice have the same basic problem for me and many other users: they force the user’s arm to be held for long times in a position that can encourage strain and wear. Part of my work includes graphic design that needs precision control, and part includes copying and pasting text and links from one monitor to applications on another, so the cursor travels a fair distance. More standard uses include document processing in word processors and spreadsheets. I’m on the computer many, many hours every day. And I find my arms/wrist hurting all too much these days.

I decided to look at something different: ergonomic mice, including vertical mice and trackballs. Here’s what I discovered, and my review of each.
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The Block Bullies

BulliesLike all schoolyard bullies, The Block use aggressive tactics intended to intimidate and cow anyone who stands up to or disagrees with them. From their phony, trumped-up OPP investigation – which after five years hasn’t produce a single charge, nor have any of the alleged miscreants even been interviewed by police – through the debacle of how they handled the sale of Collus, to bullying the hospital, to their puerile judicial inquiry, The Block are hellbent on their vendettas.

This is a group that continues to set the bar lower at every turn. This latest bit of dirty politics shows they haven’t reached their lowest level yet.

Last week, Mayor Cooper, Councillors Lloyd and Edwards received letters from the county’s integrity commissioner saying that he cleared them of any wrongdoing in a complaint against them.*

What complaint? you ask. None of these three were even aware of one until the letter exonerating them arrived.

It seems the complaint was filed by a member of The Block only last month in an attempt to prevent these three from discussing in public or participating in council discussions the judicial inquiry, its costs and the waste of public funds ($1-$2 million of your money) – or comment on its cringe-worthy pettiness and spite.

No, The Block didn’t tell these three they were filing it. No, The Block didn’t raise any issues in public (that would require a spine). They did it as they always do – in secret.

No, they didn’t have the courage to speak up face to face to these three. That would be how mature, responsible, ethical people behaved – totally against the Block’s character. No, it had to be a cowardly, “anonymous” complaint. In other circles, we call it “backstabbing.” Very Block-like.

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