Monday, April 11, 2011

Twat Writes Book

A ranty little piece about author/wanker James Frey is here at my buddy's site.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Where Did You Sleep Last Night?



This is my favorite live performance ever recorded. Now that I'm approaching 30 I can't see Kurt's suicide as anything other than an overgrown teenager's act of self-dramatization, but still. This was the last song he played on Unplugged, which was the last show he did before killing himself a few days later. He requested funeral flowers and candles on the stage. After he finished playing, he was asked if he wanted to do another take and declined. Imagine singing a song knowing it was the last thing you would ever perform. You would want to make it good. And he did.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Sick of Sausages - Street Food and the Failure of Government


This article on food trucks on Reason.com led me to investigate the sad story of Toronto's failed experiment in street food deregulation. As anyone who's travelled anywhere knows, Toronto's street food situation is not good. While New Yorkers enjoy fish tacos, DC-ites eat hot lobster rolls, and Bangkokers get every Thai delicacy imaginable, Toronto gets hot dogs, and maybe some poutine if you're in Nathan Phillips Square. This was all supposed to change in 2007,
when then-Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman loosened health regulations to allow street vendors to sell a wider variety of prepared food.

Smitherman’s proclamation that Toronto would soon be saying “goodbye to the sausage and hello to the samosa” was proven wildly optimistic. City Hall took the opportunity to implement ‘Toronto a la Carte’, a branded, self-congratulatory pilot project where potential vendors were assessed for their history of bylaw compliance history; the nutritional content and food safety risk of their proposed menu; the suitability of the proposed menu for street vending; the ethnic diversity of the food items; their use of locally sustainable produced foods; their experience and qualifications; and their proposed business plan . Those lucky enough to progress through to the second stage of the process were reviewed by a “panel of food experts” who judged the proposed food items “from the standpoint of diversity, quality and culinary excellence”.

Unsurprisingly, only eight vendors out of a possible 15 chose to proceed through to the end of this process. Those unfortunates were then made to purchase ineptly designed carts for $30,000 each and permitted to sell food from designated sites around the city, provided they complied with innumerable regulations and paid $15,000 a year. Four years later, only six heavily indebted vendors remain in the program, the others having presumably grown tired of getting all their proposed menu changes approved by Toronto’s chief health officer.

The a la carte program expires in 2011. Ideally, its dismal failure will be taken as an indictment of City Hall rather than as a referendum on Toronto's desire for quality street food. It should be quietly euthanised, with a debt relief program created for the poor suckers who participated. Most importantly we should take the opportunity to learn from its failure, because the relative inconsequentiality of the issue makes it a useful arena to debate the role of government.

It's significant that this cause has been adopted in the US by Reason, the libertarian website whose parent foundation is partly funded by the Koch brothers. While I disagree with the fundamental principles of libertarianism, I think there's a number of areas where liberals should be making common cause with libertarians. Liberals and libertarians can, I think, agree that government should stick to what it is good at. We will disagree about what this is. A libertarian might argue, for instance, that governments should not operate prisons because this is a role that can be fulfilled more efficiently by the private sector. Liberals will argue in return that incarceration engages issues of human dignity that shouldn't be placed at the mercy of market forces. This is a fundamental disagreement, with little possibility of compromise.

I think liberals and libertarians can agree, however, that governments should not be marketing multicultural street food. Governments have no experience or expertise in marketing multicultural street food. Furthermore, there is nothing about the marketing of multicultural street food that lends itself to government regulation. The marketing of multicultural street food is, all things considered, something that is better left to private enterprise. The sad tale of Toronto a la carte seems to support this hypothesis. So why did the City of Toronto stick its nose in where it was neither wanted or needed? The answer is, unfortunately, democracy.

Democracy incentivises government officials to be responsive to popular demands. This is generally desirable, but can sometimes lead to perverse outcomes. We're all accustomed to seeing infrastructure projects emblazoned with "this highway/tunnel/sewer system brought to you by the --- government", and we tolerate it because we understand the dynamics of representative government; we can't reward our politicians for the things they do for us if we don't know about them. But infrastructure projects are different from street food deregulation. Highways are static and predictable. By the time they break down, the politician who built them can expect to be comfortably retired. Street food vending, on the other hand, is an unpredictable, organic process. From day one, parking officials will clash with vendors. People will get food poisoning. Vendors will battle for turf. So a politician who wants to deregulate street food has two choices - they can do it quietly, thereby distancing themselves from any potential bad press, or they can try to take credit for it while taking care to minimise potential bad press.

Toronto a la carte is a perfect example of government choosing option B. The entire tortuous process participants were subjected to was a transparent attempt to defuse future embarrassments. One can imagine the bureaucrats in charge of the program carefully brainstorming everything that could possibly go wrong with the operation of a food stand and then implementing protocols to prevent it. The one PR nightmare they didn't envision was the one that actually happened, namely, the stifling of the program under the weight of their own incompetent regulation.

The lesson to be learned here is clear. The marketing of multicultural street food is an area where the government needs to step back and give private enterprise the room to do what it does best. City Hall should try this: Issue a bunch of licenses. Make vendors subject to the same health regulations as restaurants. Set some parking restrictions. Then sit back and let Toronto's diverse, entrepreneurial population do the rest. Yes, some people will get sick. Vendors will brawl over turf. A black market in permits will emerge. But, at the end of the day, the city will be better. Then, and only then, does City Hall get to take the credit.