Here's a really good article I found on Reddit about the differences between the economic environment for baby boomers seeking to buy their first houses a generation ago and the realities for their kids looking to buy a first home today.
"I’m of the belief that [the rise in housing prices is] likely the biggest differentiating factor between generations, in Canada at least."
The author's contention is that young people today (at least where he is in BC) must spend somewhere around 7x their annual household income to purchase their first home whereas, for the average middle class family in the 1970's, this could be done for around a single year's household income.
The writer is very clear to point out that he's doing massive generalizations using only his parent's situation and that of his and his partner. Still, an interesting idea to consider.
(I'm happy to report that Shea and I purchased a home that was, like this writers' parents, just slightly higher than our total household income when we purchased it - although we were admittedly extremely lucky to purchase in 2004 just before real estate took off in Saskatchewan.)
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Tuesday, June 30
First-Time Home Owners - 1975 vs. 2009
by
Jason
on Tue 30 Jun 2009 11:41 PM CST
Monday, June 29
Music Monday - "Then Every Head Turned With Eyes That Dreamed of Being The One"
by
Jason
on Mon 29 Jun 2009 08:25 PM CST
I wracked my brains trying to think of a unique Michael Jackson song or clip but I think I exhausted the one possibility on that the day the news of his death broke.
So instead, I went in the opposite direction (embedding disabled) with perhaps the definitive MJ video in a career that was filled with them. I mean, who else has used the video format so well for so much of their career? Radiohead pops to mind as on a similar level for unique, memorable, innovative clips but that's about it. Friday, June 26
Friday Fun Link - "This Bespells Doom" - Authors Signing Kindles (June 26, 2009)
by
Jason
on Fri 26 Jun 2009 11:40 PM CST
If Jeff Bezos was smart, he'd have incorporated a stylus right into the design of the Kindle so authors could "sign" their digital books. (Of course, maybe they feared this would make getting a signed book no more special than getting a package from UPS.)
Thursday, June 25
King of Pop Dies
by
Jason
on Thu 25 Jun 2009 09:32 PM CST
There's tons of commentary all over the web after the news broke that Michael Jackson died today. I don't have much to add but here's a couple random thoughts....
- like probably a million people, "Thriller" was my first "real" record (I'm not counting Mini-Pops and crap like that - er, except I loved the Mini-Pops back in the day.) - I'm curious what, if anything, will happen to his 50% share of the Beatles catalogue - as heartless as it sounds, if he had to die (relatively) young, he probably would've been better off dying ten or fifteen years ago. Then he would've been remembered much less ambigulously than the reaction's been today - he was preparing for a 50 show stand in London as you probably heard. If they recorded his rehearsals, that footage is going to be worth a fortune. - my favourite Michael Jackson song? "Dirty Diana" - I never did learn how to moonwalk myself but I have a vivid memory of a girl who was a few years older than me and lived down the street spending a whole afternoon with a friend trying to learn how to moonwalk. - that face morphing in "Black or White" was pretty fricken awesome at the time as were a lot of MJ's videos. - it was a big deal to stay up late to watch the big premier of the full-length video version of "Thriller" on "Good Rockin' Tonight" with Terry David Mulligan. The video scared me so badly, I had nightmares for a few days afterwards! - if you want some really tasteless Michael Jackson jokes, check out that Reddit thread above. Whether he molested children or not (he was never found guilty but it's also one of those things that people will probably ever know for sure), the implication was enough to forever colour people's perception of him. - When we were in Cancun, our resort had nightly entertainment in its show lounge and one night was a Michael Jackson impersonator who was so good compared to the rest of the generic song & dance acts that week, it was unbelievable. The performer was obviously so into Michael Jackson and if memory serves, appeared to have even had his own plastic surgery to more closely resemble his idol. I feel really bad for that guy tonight for some reason. - Thriller is often cited as the biggest selling album of all-time. I wonder if part of what makes this story so big is that Michael Jackson was the last artist to reach the level of appeal that only a select few - Elvis, The Beatles - have and with the segmentation of the market via the Internet and the 500-channel universe, etc, that's unlikely to happen ever again? - here's a little clip you may not have seen before sort of showing the over-the-top side of Jackson. Read the blurb to get the full story but basically, he was doing a Messianic performance at the Brit Awards in 1996 so Jarvis Cocker from Pulp hopped on stage, wandered around, waggled his bum at the camera then got tackled by Jackson's security guards. Wednesday, June 24
Enabling Local Democracy at the Red Deer Public Library
by
Jason
on Wed 24 Jun 2009 08:33 PM CST
I heard about this innovative library program during a presentation by Red Deer Public Library's Director at CLA. For the last two municipal elections, that city's library has created information pages for all municipal candidates from the mayor to council to both school boards. The candidates provided the information and the library simply posted it on their behalf in a non-partisan fashion. In 2004, these pages were pretty straight-forward HTML (the generic "brochure on the web"-type pages) but in the 2007 election, they created blogs for every candidate (with comments enabled!), had a dedicated domain (www.electionforum.ca), provided links to local media outlets, posted video clips and more.
Here's an explanation from the staff member who was the project coordinator: "The main focus of our website will be to provide an interactive platform for candidates to present their views and comment on election related issues. Our site will allow them to post their comments in their own words. They will be able to update their blog as the election process continues. Interested citizens will be able to post questions and concerns to which the candidates can respond. We hope to create a busy conversation site and give everyone a chance to state an opinion or ask a question. Our website is intended to promote a healthy dialogue, increasing communication and understanding between candidates and voters.Via the Election Forum 2007 website, we will strive to provide information the citizens of Red Deer will need, enabling them to make informed decisions on Election Day." The RDPL Director said that the general feeling was that this site definitely had an impact on the final result as voters were much more informed than they might have otherwise been if they didn't have this central repository for information. (I think their was also some sort of a flame-out by a candidate or a supporter on one of the blog's comment sections - I can't remember the exact details though.) Personally, I believe this is a great role for the library to play as we not only have a long history in facilitating democracy (some have called libraries the "embodiment of democracy in society") but also because we are perhaps the last completely neutral entity within society. (This used to be the media's role but I'm pretty sure that's not the case anymore.) Now, with Regina's municipal elections coming up in October, I just wish I knew someone at RPL I could suggest this idea to!  Tuesday, June 23
MetaFilter Has The Same Birthday As Me - Let's Party!
by
Jason
on Tue 23 Jun 2009 08:48 PM CST
I don't hang out there as much as I used to but MetaFilter is still one of my favourite online communities - not least because the number of librarians that hang out there. (The link is to a cool Greasemonkey script that marks all posts by librarians on the site.)
I'd lurked on the site for a year or two before finally deciding to join in the days after 9/11 feeling the need to post *something* somewhere and this place seeming like a good fit. (When I told librarian extraordinaire and MF Moderator, Jessamyn West this story, she replied: "Oh, so you're one of those people.") And now that I look, the big thing that pushed me over the edge was looking for a copy of David Letterman's first monologue post-9/11. Er, not as profound as I remembered. But that's how you rolled in the days before YouTube, kids.  In fact, you can tell how long I've been around the site since I registered as "Jaybo" rather than my current nom de plume, HeadTale! Each member is assigned a number and at the time, the fact that I had a five-digit number (11490) often made me feel inferior, especially since I could've had a much smaller number had I joined when I first started reading the site (a lesson I've learned well - now, any technology that comes along - I sign-up and grab my user name if available immediately!) Anyhow, the site is ten years old this summer and with some mild prompting at CLA from Jessamyn, I signed on to host the Regina version of MetaFilter's worldwide birthday meet-ups. We're going to meet at the Cathedral Village Free House on Saturday July 18 at 2pm until whenever (I suspect it'll go until midnight!). The Regina MF community is smallish (there are approximately three of us - at least of those who identify their location in their MF profiles) so even if you're not a MF member, feel free to swing by and say 'hello' and heft a birthday beer with me. Who knows - there may be birthday surprises in store... If you're not in Regina, check out the map of the 80+ locations worldwide that are hosting meet-ups - pretty amazing to see an online community represented in a geographic (and with the comments in the threads for each meet-up, also personalized) way like that. It's a great community so whether you show up at a MF meet-up or not, why not consider becoming a member? It's $5 USD for a lifetime membership - less than the cost of a single pint - which will allow you to post messages and responses across the various parts of the MetaFilter network of sites - including the always useful Ask.MetaFilter - plus you'll be well-positioned to host the 15th Anniversary bash!) If you're on the fence, here's a taste of the debauchery that can result at a MF meet-up (featuring Jessamyn West who was in town for Sask Library Association conference in 2008)...   Monday, June 22
Music Monday - "Scaramouche, scaramouche/Will you do the fandango?"
by
Jason
on Mon 22 Jun 2009 06:32 PM CST
A unique version of the infamous Queen song featuring a comic doing 25 of the most annoying distinctive voices in popular music.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" - Queen Sunday, June 21
Fathers & Sons
by
Jason
on Sun 21 Jun 2009 11:53 AM CST
I first posted this video last Christmas but I think today's a much more appropriate spot for it.
The underlying truth about Father's Day that I realised this year is that it isn't so much about celebrating fathers as it's a chance for fathers to celebrate their kids. (With that said, there's no reason a son can't celebrate his father as well.) Saturday, June 20
Five Things That Had The Biggest Impact in the 2009 Sask NDP Leadership Race (And Five That Didn't)
by
Jason
on Sat 20 Jun 2009 10:32 PM CST
I'll still
thinking about a post with my thoughts on some of the things the Meili
campaign could've done differently to perhaps put themselves over the
top. But until that comes clearer, I thought I'd do a post looking at
things in the bigger picture.
I never get a good response when I call for audience participation but I'll try it again. I'd love to challenge anyone reading this post to add a comment with their own lists/thoughts on this subject - anonymously or otherwise. If you have a blog and are desperate for content ideas, feel free to steal this idea as well! Or respond to it. (My only suggestion if you plan to do your own list - don't read mine first. I'm curious whether people would come up with the same things as me or not.) FIVE THINGS THAT HAD THE BIGGEST IMPACT IN THE 2009 SASK NDP LEADERSHIP RACE 1. Advance Voting Did I read somewhere that Ryan Meili got something like 75% of the votes of people who chose to wait until the convention day, hear all the presentations and endorsements, see the buzz for each candidate before making their own choice? If so, it's tempting to re-imagine the results had everyone been required to wait until the day of the convention to vote. A couple real life examples - we had one woman at our table who said she was torn between Ryan and Yens based on everything she'd seen so far. After the floor shows were over, I asked, "So?" and she just smiled and asked if she could have one of the Ryan buttons I'd offered her earlier. I also heard from a couple people who said they would've changed the order of their vote based on the floor shows. I'm sure many others felt the same way. I still love the idea of every individual member being able to vote by a variety of methods (by mail, phone, online or in person) but perhaps limiting the vote only to the day of the convention would reduce the chances of people re-thinking (or regretting!) their choices? (Can you imagine if the news of the membership scandal had broken on June 3, only a couple days before the convention and after most early votes were already in?) 2. Baby Boomers I made this point on my blog before when discussing some of Ryan's biggest challenges and I suspect that ultimately, there was a huge portion of the NDP's membership who are baby boomers (roughly everyone between 45-64 years of age) that identified most closely with Dwain Lingenfelter as a contemporary whereas the idea of Ryan as party leader was about as palatable as the idea of putting their own Gen X kid in charge of the family business no matter how accomplished or successful that young whippersnapper was otherwise. 3. Yens Pedersen Conceding Yens Pedersen withdrawing when he did after the first ballot right after Deb Higgins was eliminated, meant that nearly all of his support went to Ryan. Had he waited for a third ballot, Link would've likely gone over the top with enough support from Deb supporters who picked him second, leaving both Yens and Ryan in a more marginalized position rather than the final result which made for a much closer result in the end and stronger showing for the progressive wing of the party. Again, you can't re-write history but I can't help but wonder what might have transpired if Yens had been eliminated first and Deb was still in the field as most people expected. Would she have withdrawn as well leading to a similar finish or would she have hung on to send things to a third ballot which may have diminished Ryan's strong finish? 4. The Money Bomb Even more than the cash infusion it gave to Ryan's campaign at a critical time, even more than confirming Ryan as the most innovative user of new technology, the biggest impact of the money bomb may turn out to be that doubled Ryan's total number of donors which, if I can make one last Obama parallel  , gives Ryan a much bigger mailing list for any future endeavours he may
undertake - whether it's his own political future or directing support
towards other candidates he's backing.5. The YouTube & Floor Show Videos Ryan released a series of campaign policy videos that I found stunning in how professional and engaging they were. For a candidate without the resources to visit every constituency like Link was doing, this put them on a more level playing field - anyone who wanted to learn more about Ryan and where he stood would get a very good idea after viewing even one or two of these videos. The floor show video was even better and I'm glad when offered the chance to see a preview in the days leading up to the convention, I said no. I decided that I wanted to see this video the way everyone else would - like going to the opening night of a big summer blockbuster for the shared experience. I'm glad I made that choice - seeing it for the first time was one of the highlights of this entire campaign for me. The impact of the floor show video also ties into my first point that if everybody who voted was required to vote on the day of the convention, we may just have had a different result than we ended up with! Bonus: Name Recognition It's unfortunate but it was quite clear as I was doing my calling for Ryan that a lot of people didn't appear to even realise that there was a leadership race on or weren't really paying attention if they did know. So this vital decision that will have major implications for the future of our province was partly in the hands of people who were going to receive a ballot, see one name they recognized and send it off. I had more than one older member who told me some variation of "I always vote NDP!" clearly not realising that all of the choices *were* NDP. So if they see a ballot on it with one recognizable NDP name, that's a pretty big hurdle to overcome. FIVE THINGS THAT HAD LESS IMPACT IN THE 2009 SASK NDP LEADERSHIP RACE THAN YOU'D EXPECT 1. The Membership Scandal This was the elephant in the room at the convention and I was surprised how little attention it got except in subtle allusions and whispered side conversations. Yes, the party did a report that cleared Dwain Lingenfelter of any wrongdoing but the day after the convention ended (nice timing there!), the RCMP announced they were investigating the matter then a couple days later, announced that it had become a criminal investigation. Some people are able to let bygones by bygones and chalk it up to "just politics" or "that's behind us now" but I think there are also a number of people who saw "Waterhengate" as going beyond the usual attacks and back and forth you might see in a political campaign. (Since I keep rewriting history in this post, I should also note that the flip side is that Ryan might not have had as strong of showing as he did had this scandal not happened.) 2. Deb Higgins As I said above, not too many people expected Yens Pedersen to come in ahead of Deb Higgins. If you paired off the candidates that were most similar, Ryan and Yens were an obvious match - both the "renewal" candidates, both very progressive, both courting the youth vote. For a variety of reasons, Ryan pulled ahead in all of these areas and it appeared that Yens was being left in the dust. Dwain and Deb were also very similar - experienced with long histories in the party and actual time in the Legislature on their resumes. But their differences were also more striking and I might've thought that alone would've been enough to gain Deb more votes over Dwain than Yens took from Ryan (if that makes sense - re-reading it, I'm not sure that it does! )
But as just one example, Deb didn't really play the "first female
leader of the party"
card very much from what I saw but that might've been one way to gain a
lot more support than she ended up with. Anyhow, I can't be too hard
on her - she's ended up as
Deputy Party leader after all!3. Traditional Media I'm so completely biased here as I already think traditional media are a dying breed that I'll admit that I'm probably wrong about the type of impact traditional media had on this race. I mean, simply on the basis of the audience that a Leader Post columnist or a NewsTalk radio host has, obviously, their having an impact is inevitable to some degree. And whether it was Stefani Langenneger's line about Ryan being "a social democratic doctor living the social democratic life" being seized by the Meili campaign as an unofficial slogan to John Gormley's warming to Ryan, just because he didn't refuse to appear on his radio show, they were definitely part of the narrative of this entire campaign. But I guess my point here is two-fold - the first is that there seemed to be very little attention given to the race - at least until the membership scandal happened and then, the coverage often tended towards the sensational and confrontational rather than in-depth analysis. 4. Lorne Calvert (and Roy Romanow and Allan Blakeney) I did a tongue-in-cheek post where I begged kindly asked Lorne Calvert to endorse Ryan. I didn't expect a response and it was one of the few times in this race that I was right about something!
As I said at the time, I understand all the reasons why senior party
figures have to seen to be neutral. But at the same time, where is the
democracy if they're not allowed to share their opinions just like any
other member of the party? Those who are in roles that may impact the outcome (President, etc.) with their decisions should stay neutral of course. But how does it
strengthen the party when the men who arguably know best what it needs
have to sit on their hands while the race runs its course without their
valuable perspective? Which leads directly to my next point...5. "New" Politics The idea that politics can be done in a new way - that you don't necessarily start from the position that the Sask Party are The Enemy but that they're good, decent Saskatchewan people who just happen to have different views than you. (Note: I said you *start* from that point!) Or that you can talk about things rather than shouting about things. Or that you don't go on a talk radio show just because the host is a conservative and you're the leader of a social democratic party. All of those ideas about new ways to do things didn't seem to have a major impact in this race. I guess even the new political idea that's been proven in so many places and political races in the last few years - that Web 2.0 has the ability to overcome otherwise insurmountable odds - wasn't proven here. At least not yet. But whether Ryan's running for leader in 2012 should the Sask Party happens to win again and Link decide to step aside or if the NDP pulls out a victory in 2011 and Ryan has to wait for his chance to come around again in 2015 or 2019, as I've said a million times before the impact of the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies will only continue to grow. The Internet has changed how we think, how we see the world and how we interact. And I firmly believe that this influence extends to the way that we will do politics in the future as well. (Jason hands out guitars - everyone to sing "Kumbaya".)
Friday Late Link - Nerds vs. Jocks - The True Cultural Divide in America
by
Jason
on Sat 20 Jun 2009 07:46 PM CST
John Hodgman roasts Barack Obama at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner while trying to decide if the new President is a nerd or a jock (and including a subtle message that perhaps the expectations for Obama were set too high?).
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