Bruce Guenter's Thoughts

Friday, June 30th

Legislating Trans Fats

One of the big Canadian news items today is that the government is being pushed to limit trans fats (CBC CTV). The recommendations are to restrict trans fats to 2% in oils and soft margarines and 5% on all other foods.

In other news, food manufacturers have already been hurredly removing most if not all trans fats from their products in the past few years. Why the rush? As of Dec 13th 2005 all food manufacturers in Canada were required to include the amount of trans fat present in their products to the label. This gave shoppers (us) the data they needed to make an informed choice between different products, and choose they did.

I don't think this kind of legislation is a good idea, at least not now. It is apparent that consumers know that trans fats are bad, and that they have pushed the market to eliminate or reduce their use. What was needed was accurate reporting. The worst offenders now for keeping trans fats in foods are fast food restaurants, which do not have the same kind of labeling requirements. Even so, the major chains have all announced they are moving away from the use of hydrogenated oils in their products. Labeling requirements would keep them honest, but mandatory restrictions don't seem to be necessary, and as such would cause more problems than they solve.
Bruce on 06.30.06 @ 01:04 AM CST [link] [No Comments]

Thursday, June 29th

We are paying the copyright industry to lobby the government

This is disgusting! Apparently the government has decided it needs to pay the copyright owners to tell us what we should do about copyright laws. The organizations represented already spend millions of dollars to lobby the government, why do they need our taxes as well? Sick!
Bruce on 06.29.06 @ 04:01 PM CST [link] [No Comments]

Tuesday, June 27th

Government investment?

Yesterday we got a flyer in the mailbox from the Crown Investments Corporation of Saskatchewan. This is a government formed and sponsored holding company for the government owned and operated companies. The flyer is titled "Summary Annual Report 2005 & Utility Bundle Report 2005" and trumpets how good they've been doing at managing the crowns and investments being made by the government.

My first though, of course, was that all this good news must mean they're gearing up for an election. Why else would they decide to produce and distribute this mostly meaningless piece of literature about an government organization that has effectively no direct impact on the lives of anybody but its employees. It really just serves as middle management between the government and the corporations themselves. As such, it (the flyer) looks like just more propaganda.

My second thought was a little more serious. What business does the government have making investments with my money? If I had the taxes back that they paid into these corporations (currently and in the past) would I have made the same decisions? Why is the government competing with the business community it's also says its supposedly trying to build up?

Of course, the current government won the last election on a classic campaigh of FUD building with the same crown corporations as the sacred cow nobody should touch. Obviously there is some political support for the current scheme.

All the same, I have to wonder. If these companies were doing so well, would they not also do well with people's voluntary money instead of their coerced money (aka taxes)?
Bruce on 06.27.06 @ 11:45 PM CST [link] [No Comments]

Monday, June 26th

Tim Berners-Lee on Network Neutrality

Tim Berners-Lee (the originator of HTML and HTTP) has spoken out on the issue of network neutrality. It's being picked up all over the place. This is not the first time he's blogged about the topic, but it's probably the most concise, summed up in this most notable quote:

When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission.

Please be aware the threat is real and you can do something about it (at least in the USA). Don't let the big telcos get away with this fraud!
Bruce on 06.26.06 @ 06:46 PM CST [link] [No Comments]

Sunday, June 25th

Minimum price laws?

What would happen if we instituted minimum price laws on goods. In the above article from Cafe Hayek the idea of having a minimum price law imposed on the sale of cars is explored and compared to the reality of having minimum price laws imposed on labor. It's an interesting exercise in reductio ad absurdum, and some the comments sound well thought out.

Probably the most important comment (which itself doesn't fall on either side of the argument) is made by a poster named liberty about half way down the page: "What you are missing is all of the effects other than the immediate. When a stone falls into the water, it doesn't create just one ring." That, surely, is something missing from most political debates, no matter what the context.
Bruce on 06.25.06 @ 03:47 PM CST [link] [No Comments]

Wednesday, June 7th

I have a theory

There's been a lot of attention given to the apparent increasing prevalence of a variety of long term health problems (most notable at least to me are asthma and allergies). At the same time, our health science is getting ever more proficient at curing diseases and increasing life expectancies. How can these these both be true?

It's a strange twist of logic, but I think the latter is at least partly responsible for the former.

How many of the people with debilitating medical problems would have died when they were young? 50 to 100 years ago infant mortality was a significant issue. If a person had a peanut allergy, there were no EpiPens (tm) to carry around, and they would simply die once they were sufficiently exposed. Asthma too can be deadly, although less often. If these health problems we have problems with today proved deadly enough in the past, the genes resposible for their prevalence would not have propagated as often to future generations.

As such, curing the symptoms will leave future generations as susceptible or more than we (as a whole) are. The only solutions I see are either leaving those with problems to die, which is morally repulsive not to mention in contravention to the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm", or to somehow modify our genetics such as to change what we pass down to future generations, which again has some serious ethical implications.

Admittedly, it is likely that increased environmental chemical exposure is also involved, so I am under no illusion that the above is the sole reason for the increased prevalance. Improved diagnosis and reporting of medical problems means we are now identifying these cases more often and more specifically. However, I have not heard the above explanation either exposed as completely fallacious or pointed to as a significant factor in these diseases.
Bruce on 06.07.06 @ 05:24 PM CST [link] [No Comments]