“Once they do the mine, they’re going to leave, and we’re the people who are going to live with that. Not me, but my grandchildren, the small little kids like this. That’s who’s going to live with the pollution.”

I don’t know how this could possibly sound like a remotely good idea to anyone. The quote above is from a resident of an area that would be directly affected by dumping, and it’s true. Once your water is screwed up, everything else will naturally follow suit. Why is this not front and center on every news website in Canada?

2 Hours of Mario Kart Wii (all 32 levels) from WiiNintendo.net on Vimeo.

“‘By relocating city hall, we will be demonstrating our faith in the future of our downtown core to investors,’ Watts told an enthusiastic crowd Thursday in her annual state-of-the-city speech to the Surrey Board of Trade.

The move symbolizes the city’s determination to create an urban-style downtown that she called ‘the future of the region.’”

Pack your bags crackheads, prostitutes and homeless. You’re all moving to Langley. Don’t you love the smell of gentrification in the air? How about some form of affordable housing for the people who still live in Whalley and are going to be displaced by Mayor Watts’ grandiose plans?

Chad offered its support on Friday for UN-led efforts to bring peace to neighbouring Sudan’s troubled Darfur region by hosting a conference for rebel groups, President Idriss Deby said.

After meeting with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Deby told reporters his country would allow international peacekeepers on its soil, and would back peace talks planned for late October in Libya.

I want everyone to know that I fully support my government’s decision to back the Darfur peace talks. That will be all.

Teachers’ unions hold too much sway over what happens in the Canadian public education system, says a new report released Thursday by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) in Halifax.

The study, “Getting the fox out of the schoolhouse: How the public can take back public education,” recommends more standardized testing, pay incentives for teachers if their students score good grades, and reduced power for the teachers’ union.

I don’t quite qualify as an authority on the subject, but as someone who was raised in the public education system and as someone who eventually plans to be employed by it, I think I’ve got an idea what’s up.

I’m totally in support of teachers unions, and most unions in general. Teachers are a necessary function of society, and I feel that anything that protects them from being exploited as workers is a good thing. However, I think that this report is right in saying that teachers should receive bonuses based on the performance of their students.

Teachers are supposed to inspire kids to think for themselves and go against the grain. They’re supposed to foster a deep craving for knowledge and excellence and help ready the next generation of people for the real world.

Teachers who lack interest in their job and only show up for the paycheque are the downfall of the education system. They show up, they spout off shit lectures in monotone, leave as soon as the bell rings and give shitty assignments that involve looking up the answers to questions in a textbook for the bulk of the term, and then at the end give a test that involves nothing more than memorization. And unfortunately, the unions protect them, coddle them, and give them no reason or incentive to do any better than they are. Whether the class average is 9% or 90%, they walk away with the same amount of pay.

You could say that a teacher who’s really into their job doesn’t care about the money in the first place, and you’re probably right, but this isn’t about keeping the good teachers good. It’s about making the mediocre teachers who’ve got potential to be better have a reason to do so.

As far as I know, teachers unions currently block such catalysts of change from being offered.

The report also suggests that lockouts and strikes be banned as a means of contract negotiation, which is an issue I’m on the fence about. I think a strike, or the threat thereof, is a great way to whip an employer into shape. On the other hand, as someone who’s been in the student’s seat when a strike happens, there is definitely a sense that it puts the interests of the student aside.

Everyone should know about the amazing new tax breaks the Government of Canada has announced for students. Before you read about this, I would suggest you click the play button preceding this paragraph. Done? Alright, let’s go.

Tuition Credit
There’s now federal tax credits on 15 and a half percentage of your tuition. This means that if you pay, arbitrarily, $6000 a year in tuition (which is not unheard of at Dal). Your tax bill is now reduced by a whopping $930! Also, full-time and part-time students can claim $400 and $120 a month, respectively, as “education tax credit”

Credit on Books
If you can claim the aforementioned breaks, you can also claim textbook credit. No receipts necessary, you can claim $65 a month if you’re full-time and $20 if you’re part time.

The beauty of tax credits rather than deductions is credits are worth the same no matter what you make, whereas deductions are worth more for people that make lots of money.

For a full report on the new tax credits, go to the CBC News Personal Finance page for forms and whatnot.

Sure, it costs money. And yeah, you’re probably using the program to pirate copyrighted material, but I say this: you’ve gotta make a living somehow. You pay once, you forget about it, and you put a meal on a guy’s plate. Sounds about fair to me.

Besides, the fact that I can now check off the couple files I need in a torrent and ignore the rest, thus saving me time and bandwidth = priceless. Besides, it’s RIDICULOUSLY fast at searching AND downloading.

Go and downtown Xtorrent. If you like it, buy it. If you don’t, at least email the guy and tell him why. It’s the right thing to do either way.

The big news, of course, is that Apple’s releasing Safari on Windows — and although it’s been a rough first few days for them (and will get rougher), more choices are generally good for users, and so I’m hopeful that they can work to produce a product of quality on Windows eventually. I’m quite fond of Firefox, of course, and am very happy that people everywhere in the world continue to adopt our browser in increasing numbers.

iTunes for Windows worked for (at least) two reasons. The first is that people had iPods and needed something to organize their music with on their Windows PC. The second is that it’s a pretty good music player in general. A lot of the people I know who use iTunes in Windows aren’t iPod users.

I can’t see why anyone would switch from any browser in Windows over to Safari. Firefox users are generally pretty loyal, and if the greatness of Firefox can’t sway IE users, Safari sure as hell won’t.

The claymation is incredibly well done though, and totally in sync with the speech. It’s almost as if the animals are really talking, and when they say something that reflects the characteristics of the animal representing them (ie. A guy’s conversation about his nose, or “beak” as he referred to it, was dubbed onto a toucan) you really see the animal references that pop up in daily conversation, that kind of go unnoticed.

All in all I think it’s the most inventive copy of a show I’ve ever seen. I’d recommend it.