[URBAN NOTE] "St. Paddy's Gets Greener with Irish Influx"

Consider this post a final St. Patrick's Day post. Torontoist's Carly Conway noted that while post-collapse Ireland has become a more prominent source of migrants for Toronto, the Irish-Canadian community--"Irish-Canadian" being defined here, by me, as the community of relatively recent immigrant origins as opposed to the aggregate of people with any Irish ancestry altogether--is not nearly so cohesive, riven by time.

As Ireland’s economy continues to struggle, with its unemployment rate reaching 14%, the country’s emigration rate sits at about one thousand people a week. And Canada—Toronto in particular—is proving to be a popular destination for Irish emigrants, many of whom represent a generation of well-educated young people facing a bleak job market back home.

One of these young and well-educated expatriates is Robbie Dore. He arrived in Toronto from Dublin last month, looking for work in wealth management—an industry, he notes, that isn’t doing too well back home, as people no longer have much wealth to manage.

“I kind of wanted a new challenge for myself. Although I’ve travelled a lot, I haven’t actually lived anywhere else, and I figured Canada might be a good opportunity to restart my career,” he says. “Lovely Canada,” he adds, has a bigger and more stable financial district in Toronto, with the promise of more jobs.

Dore is one of five thousand Irish citizens Canada expects to give working holiday visas this year. These visas are designated for people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, allowing them to work in the country for up to two years. As reported in the National Post last month, this year’s number is more than double the visas offered in 2009.

Though unfortunately a result of an economic crisis, the latest wave of Irish newcomers to Canada is breathing new life into Toronto’s aging Celtic community. Dore, for example, found it quite easy to connect with other Irish Torontonians and quickly became involved in one of the GTA’s seven Gaelic Athletic Association clubs, where he’ll both play for the St. Michael's Gaelic Football and Hurling Club and coach the women’s team.

Sandra McEoghain came to Canada from Belfast in 2002—while Ireland was still experiencing a period of economic growth—and had a tougher go at meeting fellow Irish people her own age. She resorted to starting the Irish Association of Toronto in order to connect with immigrants of a younger demographic.

"At that time, most of the Irish people I met emigrated [decades] ago. I didn’t meet anyone else like myself," she says. "Then, you know, the economy tanked and we got a lot of people coming." Today, her association boasts almost five hundred members, and most fall within the eighteen to thirty-five-year-old age bracket.

This has, McEoghain points out, led to a divide within the Irish community that spans two generations. Canada’s last influx of Irish immigrants, following Ireland's War of Independence and the Great Depression, ended by the 1960s.

The age difference between the two groups doesn’t go unnoticed: “I think there’s a bit of a void,” says Donal Ward McCarthy, who moved to Toronto from Cork in 2002. “There’s a clear gap between the older generation and growing number of young Irish immigrants in Toronto.”

Norita Fleming, who's been active in Toronto’s Irish community for twenty-five years and recently won the title of Canada’s Irish Person of the Year, also acknowledges the gap, but points to a number of initiatives her generation has put into place to offer help to new arrivals and unify the community.

“We’re now beginning to get involved, to connect with the young people coming,” says Fleming, who emigrated from Cork in 1966. Their outreach is both practical and social. For one, the Ireland-Canada Chamber of Commerce launched an Irish Jobs website, where newcomers can post their resumés, and put on a seminar last month about job hunting in Canada. Fleming also organized a Welcome Sunday series at the Emerald Isle Seniors Centre. “It’s a way to connect the new arrivals with the newer members of the community…create the emotional bond,” she says. February 27 marked the series' first Sunday, complete with tea, sandwiches and authentic Irish music. Although about forty people showed up, only five were from the new wave of Irish immigrants. “It’s going to take time to connect,” Fleming says.

[LINK] "San Francisco Doing Everything It Can To Drive Zynga And Twitter Away"

The title of the article by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is a reliable guide to its subject matter.

San Francisco, unlike most other cities in Silicon Valley, has a 1.5% payroll tax. And even more stunning is that they consider gains on stock options part of payroll, meaning that any San Francisco based company going public or being acquired could get hit with a massive tax bill in the tens of millions of dollars.

They’ve got Twitter jumping through hoops to avoid the tax. The company will be forced to move to a new location in order to get a six year payroll tax break. But only if the Board of Supervisors votes to approve the legislation on Wednesday. The upside is that Twitter employees will have immediate physical access to prostitutes, drugs and weapons – the qualifying area isn’t exactly an up and coming neighborhood.

The city isn’t thanking Twitter for bringing all these high paying jobs to San Francisco, either. Rather, some supervisors don’t want the tax break at all, and seem quite willing to see Twitter bail to tax-free Brisbane. Says Supervisor John Avalos: “Who are the [Twitter] investors? Probably some of the wealthiest people in this country. And we are giving them more wealth.”

The stupidity of that statement is self evident.

But the city has another potential disaster on its hands – Zynga. The company is already moving into its new 270,000 square foot headquarters on Townsend Street, which is outside of the proposed tax free/hooker area.

We heard Mayor Edwin Lee and Board of Supervisors President David Chu met with Zynga at their offices today to negotiate the issue. I contacted Zynga to ask about the meeting. They confirmed it happened, said it was “positive and productive,” and “they appreciated the city’s interest in Zynga’s future growth.” They wouldn’t comment further.

We have heard, however, that Zynga is already looking to expand beyond the city into other areas in Silicon Valley. They already have offices in Sunnyvale and Los Gatos, for example. Our sources say Zynga is prepared to drive future employee growth outside of San Francisco. They’ll always keep some presence in San Francisco, say our sources, but may even consider moving the corporate headquarters south.

A quick question to people with relevant information. Is there much space, as in actual real estate, for further densification and development in the IT world? Is, in other words, an impending corporate exodus to lower-tax, lower-cost suburbs inevitable? This is the problem of having a metropolitan area that extends far, far beyond your urban core: the Bay Area is not limited to San Francisco County, not nearly. Should the city try for as much of a one-time windfall as it can reasonable expect instead of aiming for unrealistically optimistic outcomes?

[LINK] "Rolls-Royce Riding Swazi King Gets Pay Rise as Cuts Stoke Rage"

The situation in Swaziland, as described by Bloomberg and by other sources I've read, is as pre-revolutionary as any, with the intersection of economic difficulties and a "Let them eat cake" attitude from the absolute monarch on the top of the situation, all in a small country that's virtually an enclave of a far more democratic South Africa.

King Mswati III has a Rolls Royce, 13 palaces and 14 wives, and just received a pay increase, even as a cash crisis forced Swaziland to slash spending, feeding anger against his regime.

With the government freezing state wages and imposing higher taxes to fight the country’s worst-ever fiscal crisis, the nation’s five biggest labor groups plan “mass protests” today in the capital, Mbabane.

The unions want change in sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy as a 20 percent drop in recurrent state spending threatens to drive up a 43 percent jobless rate and push thousands of people in Africa’s third-largest sugar producer to search for work in neighboring South Africa. The king was awarded a 24 percent rise in his budget allocation.

“The anger will help speed up the process of change,” Vincent Dlamini, Deputy Secretary General of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions, said in an interview in Mbabane on Feb. 14. “We’ve seen the people of Tunisia and Egypt. They are essentially monarchies too. That can happen here as long as people consistently mobilize.”

The Congress of South African Trade Unions, the country’s biggest labor union federation with about two million members, backed the protests, calling for an end to “the intensified state of terror enforced by the royal regime and its security forces,” it said in a March 16 e-mailed statement. Swazi workers are employed in South African mines and other industries.

[. . .]

Mswati is the nation’s second ruler since independence from Britain in 1968 and the 42-year-old will celebrate a quarter of a century in power in April. The king appoints the prime minister and lawmakers aren’t allowed to belong to a political party. Security forces have quashed opposition protests during 32 years of emergency rule. In September, they “arbitrarily detained, assaulted and intimidated” human rights activists, Amnesty International said on its website.

The monarch clings to past rituals, including an annual reed dance in which bare-breasted virgins vie for his attention, and to possibly become his new wife.

At an annual praise-giving at one of the sovereign’s palaces on Feb. 12, about 2,000 women dressed in colorful fabrics sang and danced with rattles strapped to their ankles. With three burgundy feathers sticking in his hair, wearing a traditional red toga-like garment and flanked by his mother, Mswati surveyed his subjects while accepting gifts of marula wine, a homebrew made from a small round fruit.

This, and the other festivities which eulogize Mswati, are an insult to Swazis, over two-thirds of whom live on less than $2 a day, according to labor leader Dlamini.

“If your father said he has no money to pay your school fees and then he throws a massive birthday party for himself with champagne for everyone, what would you think?” he said.

Go, read. A Swazi republic would be far from being the worst thing in the world.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the prospects of Postmedia

Postmedia News is the largest shard of Conrad Black's once-mighty media empire, comprising some of Canada's most prominent newspapers (the National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, and so on). Traditionally privately held, Postmedia will soon be listing shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange. It's doing so oddly, though, as the Toronto Star's Josh Rubin points out.

The decision of the National Post’s parent company to list its shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange without an initial public offering is “highly unusual” and could indicate that the company had trouble finding an investment bank willing to underwrite an IPO, says a Queen’s University business professor.

Postmedia Network Canada Corp. filed a “non-offering prospectus” Tuesday.

In over two decades of studying the IPO market in Canada, professor Louis Gagnon said he can’t think of a similar manoeuvre.

“It tells me one of two things. That they approached underwriters and were told no, or that an underwriter expressed interest, then found they wouldn’t be able to sell the offering,” said Gagnon.

Postmedia spokesperson Phyllise Gelfand said the company is "happy with capital structure of the company and not looking to issue new shares at this time."

Postmedia was sold to a group of its unsecured creditors last summer for $1.047 billion.

One industry observer suggested the purchase agreement with creditors included a commitment to have Postmedia shares listed on the TSX by this July. The observer expects some kind of offering later this year, after the shares are listed.

The Globe and Mail's David Milstead and Susan Krashinsky suggest a lack of interest is indeed part of it. There's more.

Postmedia Network Canada Corp.’s decision to list its shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange was driven neither by a need to raise capital nor a desire to open up share ownership to the general public.

Instead, the company, owner of the National Post and 10 major metro newspapers across Canada, was motivated by the risk of losing its designation as a publisher of “Canadian newspapers” under the federal Tax Act. If Postmedia lost that status, the advertisers in its newspapers, big and small, could no longer deduct their ads as a business expense – a potentially crippling blow to the company.

The penalty “is basically, you have the advertising in your publication not eligible for a business expense,” Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey said in an interview Thursday. “Which means not very many people would advertise – which is a pretty good penalty. Everybody would recoil on that.”

Postmedia warns investors in its prospectus filed earlier this week that if its newspapers cease to be “Canadian newspapers” for purposes of the Tax Act, it expects advertising revenue “will decline significantly.” That would have a “material” adverse effect on Postmedia’s financial condition, it says, employing the term used in securities law to describe a large effect of concern to investors.

The clock is ticking for Postmedia, which acquired the CanWest newspaper division out of bankruptcy in July, 2010. The deadline for establishing its tax status as a Canadian newspaper publisher is July 31, the end of the Tax Act’s one-year grace period.

The law provides a couple of ways for a company to qualify as a Canadian publisher. One is to show that at least 75 per cent of its shares are owned and controlled by Canadians. But since Postmedia is still owned primarily by U.S. hedge funds and banks involved in the CanWest bankruptcy, it would flunk that test.

So Postmedia is taking a second approach allowed by the Tax Act: It qualifies as a Canadian publisher if it lists on a Canadian stock exchange and is not “controlled” by non-Canadians, regardless of their economic ownership.

To pass muster, Postmedia created two classes of stock, voting and “variable voting” shares. The “variable voting” shares lose their voting power if they account for more than 49.9 per cent of the company.

And for the foreseeable future, they will indeed be powerless: Postmedia issued nearly 37 million variable voting shares, compared with just 3.7 million voting shares. The numbers suggest that non-Canadians currently own roughly 90 per cent of the company.

“It’s obviously easier to go public,” Mr. Godfrey said. “The share structure at work here has been used by several other organizations, where you have voting shares, which will be Canadians, and variable voting shares, which will be non-Canadians, with the voting shares always having 50.1 per cent of the votes on any given vote.”

The company has also adopted a poison pill that allows existing shareholders to buy stock at a 70 per cent discount if a new stockholder acquires 20 per cent or more of the company’s shares.

Were it not for the tax considerations, it seems Postmedia would not have done a listing in this way. No shares are being sold as part of the TSX listing, meaning none of the stockholders are cashing out of their investment as a result. And the company isn’t raising any capital.

In addition to being part of the wreckage of Black's erstwhile empire, Postmedia is hindered by the sorts of problems intrinsic to media conglomerates : "Most North American newspaper companies are showing year-over-year revenue declines, with Postmedia saying its revenue for the quarter ended Feb. 28 likely fell 4 to 5 per cent. In addition, Postmedia has significant debt and covenants that restrict the payment of common stock dividends. With $616.3-million of debt at Nov. 30 and EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, of $157.6-million in the fiscal year that ended in August, Postmedia has a debt-to-EBITDA ratio of nearly four to one."

[LINK] "Consciousness and eyesight"

Over at his new blog, Speed River Journal, vanwaffle linked to an interesting argument about the origins of consciousness.

Malcolm MacIver at Science Not Fiction theorizes it arose as animals left the sea and adapted to terrestrial environments. Life underwater requires short reaction times, he argues, because the range of senses, particularly sight, is limited. These circumstances don’t allow an organism to contemplate multiple futures or outcomes. In contrast, a terrestrial animal may see a predator or prey at a distance, and gains an advantage by being able to choose the best way to pursue or evade.

I suggest his argument fails to consider other animals making efficient use of senses other than sight, for example a dog’s smell or a bat’s echolocation. Sharks and other aquatic creatures rely on electroreception for remote sensing or communication, because salt water is an efficient conductor of electrical charge.

If consciousness were not useful underwater, it would follow that animal lineages returning to aquatic life would lose the capacity over time, cetaceans for example. However, whale and dolphin intelligence relies heavily on sonar for sensory input. On a completely different branch of the tree of life which does not descend from terrestrial organisms, octopuses possess powerful vision while demonstrating learning and problem-solving abilities.

In the comments, MacIver suggests that cephalopods don't have consciousness so much as strong reactive capabilities.

Overall, I'm skeptical about his argument, certainly as a general explanation, but it might play a role in explaining some elements of consciousness.

[LINK] "A Journeyman's View"

Andrew Barton's perspective on the proliferation of writers whose work is cheaply available online is pretty much my own. Pretty much; I can't imagine writing being a job capable of supporting me anyway, and see blogging here and elsewhere as being as much about creative fulfillment as anything else. This is what happens when you've mass literacy in a society and an economy allowing people to produce and exchange large volumes of narrative very inexpensively.

Once upon a time, it was well within the realms of possibility - even probability - for a writer to make a living off their work. Back before the Second World War, when the pulps were one of the largest sources of popular entertainment there was, there was always a demand for short stories and novelettes to fill their pages - and while contributors may only have been a cent per word, that works out to $50 for a 5000-word story. May not sound like much, but that's $50 in 1939 dollars, which translates to $764.19 in 2009 dollars. A sufficiently driven writer able to burn enough typewriter ribbons could manage to live on that sort of pay.

The writer's market is a different place today. Sure, there are still markets for short stories, but unless you're selling one every other day you're going to have difficulty living off them - and the market isn't big enough to support that kind of glut anyway. Professional authors haven't lived off shorts for decades; it's all about novels now. So it's not that surprising that some people are starting to get worried about the impact of digital piracy on the livelihoods of authors.

The Globe and Mail carried an article dealing with this the other day, asking whether piracy and electronic publishing might be a one-two punch that could knock out mid-list authors. Personally, I think that's bunk. There will always be authors as long as people read for pleasure - I'm more concerned about the impact that AI writing software may have on the world of authorship in the years ahead, but fortunately for wordsmiths we're not quite at that point yet. But there are plenty of people who don't agree.

[. . .]

This... I can't get behind this. People, the sort of people who read at least, are not complete idiots. People can tell when what they're reading is poor, when what they're reading is crap. They'll respond by not reading it any more. Sure, in a large enough sample size you'll likely find a few people who like something, but "a few" is not enough support for an author to build a livelihood on. What's more likely, in my mind, is that the amateur explosion will result in a lot of dross from which a small number of worthwhile pieces will emerge. Everyone had to be an amateur at one time; it took twelve years from the time I started actively writing until the day I sold my first story. All we're seeing today is the largest and most transparent slush pile in history

Go, read.