[PHOTO] South side of the Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

Taken immediately after yesterday's picture, this is a shot of the assuming south side of the Tarragon Theatre facing Bridgman Avenue.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• At A (Budding) Sociologist's Commonplace Book, Dan Hirschman wonders why "traditional" religions--to use the nomenclature--aren't given respect. One answer might be related to the fact that practitioners of traditional religions are almost always minorities in their own countries.


• blogTO lists 12 different Mayan-apocalypse themed bar events around Toronto.


• Eastern Approaches notes the efforts of Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin's desires to improve the quality of life in the Russian capital.


• Geocurrents observes the mining boom that is populating a desert stretch of Western Australia.


• The Global Sociology Blog crunches the numbers and notes the many ways in which the United States stands out among countries for its gun violence, and factors leading to said.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that, for relatively less developed countries, the investments of Communism in human capital and assorted subsidies did give many of these an advantage. (Turkmenistan, yes; Estonia, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, not so much.)


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer predicts rising gas prices and relatively low oil prices.


• Window on Eurasia notes problems integrating Muslim conscripts in the Russian army.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Doesn’t Need to Pay for New Streetcars Right Away, No Matter What Rob Ford Sa"

Torontoist's David Hains

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Doesn’t Need to Pay for New Streetcars Right Away, No Matter What Rob Ford Sa"

Torontoist's David Hains is unimpressed by Mayor Rob Ford's command of the city budget.

The City’s capital budget is overlooked and misunderstood by many, but it plays an important role in building Toronto. It’s the part of the budget that funds large, long-term infrastructure projects like the Union Station Revitalization. But a look at how some members of city council have recently approached one of Toronto’s higher-profile capital projects, an arrangement to purchase 204 next-generation streetcars (the order has since been reduced to 182), reveals a problematic strategy for spending these crucial capital dollars.

In 2008, the City committed to purchasing 204 modern, European-style streetcars (also known as light-rail vehicles, or LRVs) as part of the capital budget. Council voted in favour of the move, 29 to 11. This decision followed a staff analysis that buying new streetcars would be the City’s most cost-effective option; maintaining the aging streetcar fleet was expected to be so expensive that deferring the purchase of new vehicles wasn’t considered to be worth it. At the time, council believed that one third of the LRV purchase would be assumed by each order of government, but federal funding didn’t come through. Conservative cabinet minister John Baird even infamously told Toronto to “fuck off.”

[. . .] Mayor Ford’s administration offered a new way of thinking: paying for streetcars, Ford and his allies began to insist, means taking on evil, evil debt. So we better pay for these streetcars up front, because evil things are bad.

This talking point started a couple months before last year’s budget vote, with Team Ford using it to justify their unpopular proposed budget cuts.

In the face of a surplus of close to $200 million (which then grew to $292 million when all the totals came in), the argument was that all of this money was needed to pay for David Miller’s unfunded streetcar purchase—that it couldn’t be used to stave off cuts.

[. . .]

What Ford is suggesting here is that in order for the City to purchase streetcars responsibly, it has to pay the money up front, to avoid debt. To this end, in last year’s budget, a policy was passed to have all future surpluses applied to the streetcar purchase until it is fully paid off.

But Rob Ford is wrong, and the people promoting this idea either don’t understand budget basics, or are being disingenuous.

Put aside for the moment that the way council put together the streetcar debt financing ensured there was no net debt increase, and let’s focus on how the capital budget works. The City of Toronto is legally prohibited from running a deficit on its operating budget, but it takes on debt to fund large purchases in its capital budget. (Deficit is a shortfall on a yearly financial obligation, whereas debt is borrowed money, repayable over time.) This is a sensible way of doing things, because then the City can pay off its capital purchases—like the new streetcars—over their useful life, rather than scrimping and saving to pay for them up front. To use a household analogy, you pay off your mortgage while you live in the house, rather than waiting to buy one outright in 15 years.

Those in favour of paying off the streetcar purchase right away say that they’re not only retiring debt early, but also eliminating some interest costs, and thus saving money. However, this misses the big picture. The current borrowing costs (or interest rate) for a 30-year City of Toronto bond are 3.80 per cent, which represents a low-interest-rate environment, thanks in part to the City’s strong interest rating. This should mean that the City is more willing to invest in worthwhile projects, or re-finance old debt, because it’s relatively inexpensive to do so. Debt financing is worse when interest rates are high, and Toronto has a really good situation right now.

[URBAN NOTE] "Ikea monkey Darwin ordered to stay at sanctuary, owner refuses to visit"

A follow-up to the story of Darwin, the former pet Japanese macaque liberated at IKEA, courtesy of the Toronto Star.

Darwin, the monkey that shot to worldwide fame this month when it was found wandering an Ikea parking lot wearing a faux shearling coat, will not be going home with his owner for the holidays.

Justice Michael Brown ruled Friday morning that the monkey must stay at the sanctuary where it is now being held until at least mid-January.

Brown also denied a request for weekend visitation away from the sanctuary for the monkey’s owner, Yasmin Nakhuda, but said she could visit him there.

For her part, Nakhuda said she would not visit Darwin at the sanctuary, fearing that such a visit would only heap more stress on the pint-sized pet.

“How would you feel to see your child in a cage and be with him outside the cage?” said Nakhuda’s husband, who would identify himself only as “Sam,” outside the court.

Sam told reporters that having Nakhuda visit the sanctuary would be “damaging to Darwin. I don’t know if human beings are capable of understanding this. I don’t know if the judge is capable of understanding this,” he said.

[. . .]

She has rented a cottage in Kawartha Lakes, the closest township to the GTA that doesn’t prohibit monkey ownership. Spurred by that news, officials there are rushing to enact a bylaw to ban exotic animals.

[LINK] The Tau Ceti system

A large part of me wants to making the posting of maps of planetary systems a daily feature. I'll satisfy myself by reposting the below map, drawn up by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo of the orbits of the five worlds discovered orbiting nearby Tau Ceti (Sol Station, Wikipedia), after Wednesday's remarkable announcement. It turns out that a dense cloud of debris in-system might mean a planet would get heavily bombarded with cosmic detritus, but certainly doesn't mean planets won't form in the first place.



This came with this press release authored by Abel Mendez Torres, who made the point that Tau Ceti e (orbiting just inside the inner edge of the habitable zone, makred in blue) and Tau Ceti f (the outermost planet, orbiting just inside the outer edge of the habitable zone) are only marginally habitable.

Tau Ceti e doesn't look very promising.

The planet Tau Ceti e orbits close to the inner edge of the habitable zone. It receives about 60% more light than Earth from the Sun making it a hot planet probably only habitable to simple thermophilic (heat-loving) life. Its mean global surface temperature should be near 70°C assuming a similar terrestrial atmosphere. However, it is likely that superterran planets have much denser and heat trapping atmospheres and Tau Ceti e might be instead dominated by a strong greenhouse effect making it more likely a super-Venus than a super-Earth. Without any knowledge of its atmosphere we are not able to tell if it is a mildly hot planet tolerable for simply life forms or a very hot non habitable Venus-like world. Tau Ceti e has an Earth Similarity Index of 0.77 assuming a more terrestrial-like atmosphere.

Tau Ceti f, now, might well be more promising.

The planet Tau Ceti f orbits close to the outer edge of the habitable zone. It only receives about 27% the light of Earth from the Sun making it a cold planet probably only habitable to simple psychrophilic (cold-loving) life. Its mean global surface temperature should be near -40°C assuming a similar terrestrial atmosphere. However, it is likely that as Tau Ceti e, it is also dominated by a strong greenhouse effect making it even acceptable for complex life, which requires temperatures from 0°C to 50°C. Without any knowledge of its atmosphere we are not able to tell if it is a frozen Mars-like planet tolerable for simply life forms or even an Earth-like world. Tau Ceti [f] has an Earth Similarity Index of 0.71 assuming a more terrestrial-like atmosphere.

It's worth noting that there is a very large gap between e at ~0.55 AU and f at ~1.35 AU. Might there be other planets, smaller planets, squarely in Tau Ceti's habitable zone? (0.7 AU seems to be the right distance.)