Welcome back

After a full year, I am starting to post here again! The first change is that I started to use one of those new (or are they? haven`t been here a while) Blogger templates. While I guess they'll be very generic soon, the good thing is this means that there is a mobile site attached.

I haven't yet decided what the breadth of this Survey of Creativity will be but assuredly, there will be business and there will be politics. Stay tuned for more!

Omar Khadr – Child soldier

I’m trying to understand what the problem is in Omar Khadr’s case. He’s currently 23 years old but was caught in Afghanistan 8 years ago. To me, living in 2010, a 15 year old is a minor. It was clear, to me, that a 15 year old soldier was a child soldier and should be treated as such. Furthermore, this was only one of the many problems with the case: potentially inadmissible proof, the treatment of a child as an adult and the whole Guantanamo prison fiasco. But to me, the one clear thing is that he was a child soldier!

 

Legally, it seems to be not so clear. Not only is 15 year old the threshold in many texts but the countries themselves define how to react to another country’s child soldier. The USA might not have been in the wrong in arresting him… but then, he wasn’t treated as a soldier at all. He was treated as a person who killed an American citizen. The problem is that, it should have been one or the other. Either he was a soldier protected under international conventions or not, and given the benefit of doubt until proven guilty.

 

As a Canadian citizen, the government should have pushed to have him stand a fair trial and it is not too late to do so. The government must seem active in this high profile case and show that, at the very least, a Canadian citizen can expect justice. It really pained me to hear Khadr’s lawyer dismiss the judge as against them and saying that it was such a sham that their only hope would be to sway the jury. And, to all people saying that, if he wasn’t a terrorist, 8 years in gitmo would have made him one, while that may be true, it could also be the opposite. Morally, we need to think: Do we want an innocent person in prison (if he is one…)? Even if that made him mad, there are mental institutions for such cases.

3 parents for 1 child

This week,I've heard about legislation in British Columbia that aims at legalizing the idea that a child can have more than two parents. Obviously this is something that might create some technical or legal problems but really, morally, there is no reason to not allow this (as far as I can see anyways).
Are there any reasons as to why we shouldn't have such laws?

Understanding a decision

Important news came on Friday to those working in the pharmaceutical industry in Canada. After the drastic price reduction of generic drugs in Ontario, the Quebec government announced that those prices would also be in effect here.

 

The government expects to save about 164 million yearly and Quebec residents can expect to pay less for their generic drugs. Due to competition, even innovator drugs that have a generic counterpart might see a price drop. This is significant change and is something that seems beneficial to the citizen.

 

From the generic industry’s point of view, however, this is catastrophic. The reduction in the profit margins will be substantial and, frankly, jobs are in danger. I’m part of that industry and I wondered what this meant and how much of an impact that would have on Quebec’s society. Even though most drugs sold are generics, the industry itself accounted for 23 percent of all of the biopharmaceutical industry’s workers. Even though the recent recession probably increased its weight, the fact remains that it was not central to the sector in the province. In fact, the strengthening of the innovator industry against the generics has been key to the development of the strong biopharmaceutical growth in Montreal. At this point, I also want to point out that this strategy meant that qualified people would be retained or come to the Montreal region and that in turn, this would mean that the area would become a prime pool of workers for the generic industry. The end result made Montreal a strong innovator and generic pole. The focus of the provincial government, however, was innovators.

 

With this in mind, we need to go back to March 2010 and the much talked-about Bachand budget. The budget, asking for sacrifices from the general population was, in the early days, very unpopular. Even if the government announced in it that they would do all the heavy lifting, people did not believe them. In the meantime, Ontario was announcing that they would slash the prices of their generic drugs, something much better received by the population. The Liberal government here saw this as an opportunity. It could cut from an obscure and relatively small industry, something that would not have strong repercussions.

 

So we are here. The government saving money and gaining political sympathy at the expense of the generic’s industry. Politically, this seems to be a good move and, as I said before, as a citizen, it means that it’ll cost less to buy drugs (whether it is through taxes or through private insurance). Economically however, I’ll direct you to this Fraser Institute article saying how the price setting done by the Ontario government might have been the problem in the first place, a problem that still remains.

Re-blogging: Homelessness with cameras

A while ago, I posted about the idea of giving cell phones to homeless people. This was following an article about a homeless person snapping a picture of the American First Lady. Well, this week, Change.org posted another article about the subject, looking at what happened in the media after the “incident”.

 

The full story here.

The imperial wisdom of crowds

Earlier today, I received an invite to try a website called Empire Avenue. Similarly to foursquare, it blends entertainment and social media.

 

 

What links it to the title of this post however is the format: It’s a stock market. The book Wisdom of Crowds had a whole chapter on decision markets, talking about the well know stock exchanges (like the Nasdaq) or virtual exchanges like the Hollywood Stock Exchange.

Aside from their value in letting people exchange real or digital commodities they were also extremely useful. Indeed, before the Oscars it was child play to find out who the winners would be simply by looking at the prices at HSX (and yes, it worked even for the so-called upsets).

Coming back the Empire Avenue, it’s a virtual exchange like HSX, only this time, instead of movie stars you trade your online friends. As you gain online influence, your price goes up. The influence in this case is linked to how often people hear about you on the web (twitter, facebook, blog) or how many shares people buy within the game. So far, the community is small and the value, to me at least, is purely entertainment. However, as it grows, the pool of user will hopefully get diverse enough to let us put a real price on the popularity of a particular online entity, whether it be a brand website or a politician.

Speaking of politics, I can see many ways a person could use such a system to engage his constituents and mobilize them for campaigns or the like while getting to know which of the opponents should be feared. At any rate, I started playing with it today, and, if it gets interesting, I’ll keep posting about it. If you feel like you want to try it, they gave me a few invites so you can try e-mailing me and I’ll send you one if I have any left.

Privacy

With Facebook’s move to take over the internet and Google’s taking information from unsecure wi-fi networks, privacy has been in the news quite often lately. It seems that we are moving towards a world where privacy is greatly threatened (Yes, it’s a “Cracked” link).

That may be true that our current definition of privacy is coming to an end. I think it’s impossible for someone in my generation to go to a party and not have every single one of your friends know about it. The truth is that we are making choices that are leading us into a world that is more integrated, where information is readily available but where privacy is diminished. It seems as if we must make a choice between this greater access to data and the ability to keep our secrets.

However, it is our choice on where the boundaries are and we can control on how our data is going to get used.

I’m not taking a stance on what would be better here, but simply stating that we have a choice.