Les Bonnes Choses

I'll keep this short -- I have to, because you might be a Canadian reading this in a month's time when the CRTC's ruling kicks in, leveling the playing field so that the country's major internet service providers can finally compete with the small market providers who are obliged to lease the lines running into your house from the big ISPs. Why this arrangement? Well, can you imagine if signing up for service from a different company required them to dig up the road leading out of your subdivision to run some cable into your basement? Right. So they're stuck with the lines owned by the big companies that were laid down when your neighbourhood was but a collection of plots. Up until now, the little guys competed on the basis of price, typically offering unlimited downloading for a fairly low price. That's pretty much their only option, because they don't have control over the network and therefore can't compete on service. But now, these smaller ISPs are compelled to offer the same metered usage plans offered by the big companies from whom they lease the lines over which they would like to provide your service. Now they do get a 15 percent wholesale discount, which means they pay $0.85 to lease $1 of bandwidth from Rogers/Bell/Your Regional 700lb gorilla. The problem is, those 15 cents? That represents the profit margin for these guys. If they want to compete on price, it comes right out of those fifteen cents. So unless I am missing something, the CRTC has effectively imposed a maximum profit margin for small ISPs.

In general, the more of something you use, the more you have to pay for it. And on that level, usage-based pricing makes sense. The 700lb gorillas all offer plans with meager bandwidth quotas; if you use more than your quota, you have to pay more. That would be reasonable, except the overage fees can be pretty high. Rogers, for example charges up to $5/GB for their lowest tier service (their highest tier service, incidentally, caps out at 175GB/mo for $100, which is about 66% of the monthly quota I enjoy with Comcast for which I pay less than half as much). If you subscribe to their highest tier, they will only charge you $0.50/GB for going over your limit. I tried to find information about what the actual cost is for Rogers to send 1GB of data to your house, but it turns out that these companies treat this information as a trade secret. Where's wikileaks when you need them?

If we assume that Rogers is at least breaking even at $0.50/GB (I've read estimates that the actual cost is more like $0.03), then the $5/GB they charge their lowest tier customers is a 1000% profit. How come they're not capped at a fifteen percent profit margin like the little guys?

I was thinking about gambling, and gambling addictions on my bus ride this morning. Not because I've got a gambling problem, mind you. Quite the opposite, in fact. I am extremely risk averse, and consequently, gambling has absolutely no appeal to me. I have absolutely no interest in ever setting foot in Vegas.

But there are others who quite enjoy gambling - playing cards, going to casinos, et cetera. Some do it responsibly, and budget for it as a form of entertainment. They could spend $300 to go bungee jumping, but instead blow it at a night at a casino instead. Being risk averse, I think that's actually the lesser of two evils.

However, some people are "problem gamblers": they gamble compulsively, often going into considerable debt. I'll preface this line of thinking by admitting I have done absolutely no actual research on the topic. But I think the problem with gambling addiction is that whatever changes to your brain chemistry happen with the thrill of winning, it's like a narcotic to this group of people, whereas for someone like me, the most salient aspect of gambling is the inevitable experience of losing. Because we all know that the odds are stacked in favour of the house. So it seems that problem gamblers have a problem because they don't seem to be reacting appropriately in the face of repeatedly losing. What I was wondering is this: would someone be a problem gambler if they rarely lost?

It's my bedtime. Often, that involves randomly thrashing about the internet to see if there is any kernel around which I can throw my interest and delay my sleep. That's what my bookmarks are for. Naturally, I have an eclectic set of bookmarks, virtually none of which being a means of finding what team won whatever game was played on a particular evening. Rather, I have sites such as Nature bookmarked. Because there's not really much to think about after a game is done (at least, not if you didn't actually play in it). Somebody won. Somebody lost. And either you're thrilled about Green Bay going on to the Superbowl, or you're not. So I turn to science websites. Okay, so stories involving polymers are dullsville. But you're bound to find at least one scientific discovery that is actually comical. Like this one.

Granted, the authors weren't trying to be funny. But if you like Monty Python, the connection is irresistible. Check it out. And be sure to watch the video, but imagine the computer graphic is John Cleese.

I had a very enjoyable grownup weekend, and the contagion that had infiltrated my body was good enough to wait until I had dropped Rebecca off at the airport on Sunday noon before it began to suck the very life out of me. Lacking the energy to do anything much, and in consideration of both the health of my coworkers, and of vanity for not wanting to appear as some kind of revenant in public, I stayed in all day yesterday. I didn't even venture to the door step to fetch the mail. It wasn't until around 10 pm last night that I realized that, with nobody to talk to and not much to say, I hadn't spoken a single word in over 24 hours. I reviewed my day from a third-person perspective, and thought it reminiscent of the first half of Castaway, in which it was Tom Hanks' character's lack of dialogue that really set the atmosphere for the movie.

You know how sometimes you'll hear, "Oh, he just likes to talk to hear the sound of his own voice". I bet that on some level that's partly true of everyone, because silence gets kind of weird after awhile.

It's been four days since my last post (which was practically Twitter-ready), so I've been feeling I should probably put something up. Without anything in particular to say, I'd go back and flesh out a saved draft, but alas, the most recent note I had jotted down made absolutely no sense to me. Regardless of how bizarre my thoughts may come across in this blog, I should at least be able to decipher them, so it's probably for the best that I sent it to the bit bucket.

So I am home this evening, waiting for my wife to return. She's getting a two-fer, as she gets both quality time with me sans-enfants, and I left her with the girls after dinner, purchases in hand, to see Wicked.



So what's a man to do when his wife is out on the town, when his wife is normally out of town? The freedom is almost paralyzing.

From a CBC article concerning compelling public marriage officials to marry same-sex couples, one of whom has threatened to resign:

"I have no objection to gays getting married. My only objection is forcing me into doing it."

...um, so you do object then.

Ever see a resume for someone calling themselves a systems analyst and wonder, what does that mean, exactly? I do, or rather, I did until just now, when I realized that it implies some kind of analysis of a system, which is actually sort of what I do. From Wikipedia,

[A] system (from Latin systēma, in turn from Greek σύστημα systēma, "whole compounded of several parts or members, system", literary "composition") is a set of interacting or interdependent system components forming an integrated whole.

So even within your own body you've got your circulatory system, your nervous system, etc. And I guess that means someone like me who studies those things would be a systems analyst. Outside your body there's all sorts of other systems, some of the most complex being social systems. Here's the interesting dynamic that prompted this entry:

States seek to deny birthright citizenship to children of illegal immigrants

Lawmakers in Georgia and other states complain illegal immigrants are committing crimes in their communities and competing for public benefits and jobs.

Being a systems analyst, I feel compelled to point out, as others have done, two points: First, the jobs that these immigrants are willing to do are ones that US citizens refuse to do (many would prefer to earn the same amount of money through welfare - I wish I had a reference, and vaguely remember some socially conscious comedian like Bill Maher pulling a stunt demonstrating this). Second: if you're not legally able to work, and your kids aren't legally able to work, but you'd rather not go back to TJ and get shot up in a turf war, will you a) engage in criminal activity because gangs don't ask for your green card, or b) ... well, there is no option b, is there?

So, yeah, systems analyst. I used to think it was a euphemism for corporate dead-weight. Now I realize we need more of them.

Happy New Year!

I don't know of any particular doomsday prophesy calling for the Apocalypse on 01/01/2011, and so you may not fully appreciate the relief you might otherwise have felt to find the sun rising as usual this morning.

A few days ago, Jude asked me an innocent-seeming question at bedtime. I can't remember the exact wording, but I thought it had something to do with the end of the day. He wanted to know about a day where the sun doesn't come up. I explained to him about the days getting shorter, and how at the North Pole where Santa lives and the South Pole where penguins live, the sun doesn't come up at all during some of the year. He followed up with a question about the sun burning out, to which I replied that the sun will eventually burn out, but not for a very very long time, after we're gone.

I had thought at the time that this second question was a sort of shift in topic, but I suddenly realized yesterday that this was what he was interested in the whole time. You see, he asked again, en route to the museum, about "the end of days", when the sun burns out. No idea where he heard about "The End of Days", but it appears he was under the impression that the last day on the calendar marked the end of days -- after which time the sun would burn out and the world would grow cold and dark. And I appreciated at that time just how well adjusted Jude seemed to be in the face of Armageddon.