Sloat vs Grand Erie District School Board

So there's recently been some litigation in the family, and I wanted to give a full recounting of what's happened, why it's such an affront to decency and justice, and why my mother got to spend a day having her case heard in front of a panel of provincial judges. This'll be long, so strap in. 

Carol Ann Sloat

My mother, Carol Ann Sloat, has been a trustee for the Grand Erie District School Board (GEDSB) since 2003. And even then, this wasn't new for her - I remember going with her to meetings of the Dufferin County board back when I was about ten years old, because she'd actually go to most of the meetings, just as a regular member of the public. (It's funny the things that seem normal when you're a kid - I didn't really understand how unusual it was for a mom of two young-ish children to be that deeply involved in the meetings of a government body. She wasn't there to pester the board, she just wanted to know what was happening.)

If any of you have met my mom, you know she's a real believer in this stuff. Before the current unpleasantness, she'd never missed a board meeting in 20+ years as a trustee. She reads the lengthy board packages before every meeting, she tries to know people all through the school system so she can hear about issues, she volunteers for all kinds of different events, and she's always been extremely focused on how to do the best job of educating kids with the resources available. I'm a political activist on many issues, but she's really not - she tries to stay away from the hot-button culture war fights, other than to point out the obvious truisms - stuff like "Be nice to people who are different from you". (After that, get back to improving education.)

As you might be able to tell, I love my mom. She's a damn good person, and always has been. She really cares about this issue, she knows it like the back of her hand, and she's invested literal decades of her life into making her society a better place for student learning. Which is why it has been so bloody enraging to see what happened next. 

Ontario School Boards

School boards in Ontario used to be quite independent, but back in the mid-90s, a series of spendthrift boards abusing their taxation powers led the provincial government to clamp down on trustees. Boards lost their power to set their own tax rates, they lost some of their ability to bargain contracts with teacher unions, and so on. This greatly reduced the powers of trustees, and the position has become less than it used to be. 

Into that void has stepped the position of Director of Education. This is basically the CEO of the Board. Directors are still employees, and the trustees are still their bosses, but the directors of the province have pushed hard for greater independence and less accountability. With trustees commanding less respect, past governments have given directors a lot of their wishlist - the Director is officially the only employee the trustees should interact with directly, and the trustees are to set policies which the Director is fully in control of implementing. And the Director is the boss of all the lower-level staff, which gives them a ton of leverage over day-to-day operations. As you can imagine, if you get the wrong sort of personality in that slot, they can rapidly create an incredibly toxic work environment. (You can probably see where this is going.) 

JoAnna Roberto and the Public's Right to KnowNo

Back in 2020, a new director was appointed by the name of JoAnna Roberto. And while there's been occasional strife with previous directors, this ushered in a much uglier state of affairs. I can't think of any way to describe what happened next other than "she is terrified of the idea that she might someday be held accountable for something". Even as an outside observer, it's pretty easy to verify a lot of the facts that have led me to believe this. 

Like most government agencies in the modern era, the GEDSB used to live-stream its meetings for public consumption. They would then leave the archived videos up, because obviously, that's what anyone who cares about open government would do. So naturally, early in the Roberto years, the archives all got deleted. I've logged onto live streams of 6:30 meetings, had the meeting sit at a "The meeting hasn't yet started" screen until after 10:00, the meeting video consisted almost entirely of voting to adjourn, and then right after adjournment the meeting video was deleted. 

But of course, that was still too much accountability. Now they've totally stopped the Youtube live-streams, and use Teams meetings instead. If they don't want you seeing the meeting, they simply never let you in. (I've watched a couple using a pseudonym, because I'm sure they would never let a Sloat view anything. It's actually pretty funny, in a dark way, just how incompetent this new regime is - they're tyrants about this kind of thing, but never stop to think about how easy it is to go around them.)

The Board has also taken to abusing rules for holding meetings in closed "in camera" sessions. Naturally, I don't know what exactly is discussed in there, but I've seen school boards operate in the past, I've been on nonprofit boards myself, and I know how much time should usually be spent in closed sessions. The GEDSB is currently spending ten or twenty times as much of their meetings in camera as any other board I've ever seen, including the GEDSB itself pre-Roberto. There's no way that this could possibly be legitimate, so it's obviously just a tactic for keeping things out of the public eye. We don't even need to guess about this - for example, they've had votes to ratify board policies passed in-camera. That's a very clear violation of provincial law. 

And this is systematic, and affects every channel they can think of. I've never before heard of a public official on this level who leaves their official Twitter account locked for years at a time, for example. 

Crushing The Trustees

The one group that can hold a Director to account is the Board's trustees - they can discipline or fire her, when nobody else can. So naturally, controlling the trustees has been a big focus of Ms. Roberto. 

In practice, that's mostly boiled down to having her pet lawyers yell at the trustees until enough of them comply with whatever the Director wants. For most boards of public agencies, there's no lawyer in a typical meeting, because why would you ever need one? For the GEDSB, there's always at least one, and often two, there for every board meeting. If a meeting isn't going the "right" way, the lawyers interrupt to say that something's required/prohibited. They always seem to get the floor faster than the actual trustees do, as well - that seems grossly inappropriate. 

If someone points out that the legislation doesn't actually agree with what the lawyers are saying, one will angrily tell the Board that he knows the guy who drafted the law, and they need to follow his interpretation of what that guy wanted, instead of following the actual law of the province. (I should check if that can be reported to the Law Society of Ontario, come to think of it - it's got to be discipline-worthy to explicitly instruct a client to disregard the law...)

And honestly, I get why a lot of trustees go along with this. They're not lawyers, and a lawyer telling you what the law demands is going to be pretty convincing to most laypeople. I get annoyed at the trustees who follow along, but honestly, I don't hate them for it. They're doing what they think is right for the board. I just hope that they come to understand what mistakes they've made, and then work on fixing up this mess. 

Opening Salvoes 

Of course, you can't cow all the trustees just by waving a lawyer around. Someone like my mom has been around forever, knows education law pretty well (because she'll actually go read the laws if she has a question about them), and has a very low BS tolerance. Worst of all, my mom likes to ask questions. And since it seems like this Director never wants to be asked a real question, I'm not surprised that there's been a lot of strife. 

For a year or so, there was raised blood pressure all around, but no open warfare yet. The first serious salvo was accusing my mom of misusing meeting minutes. This is an absurd allegation - yes, she kept all her minutes going back to the day she became a trustee, because record-keeping is good. And yes, that includes in-camera minutes, because she's got just as much of a right to those as she does to the public minutes. But the "misuse" in question was really just "You're using records to contradict my claims" - in other words, exactly what the trustees are supposed to do. The Roberto administration seemingly found this annoying, so it demanded that the records all be destroyed. I don't know all the details here, but it was clear that there were some pretty stern legal threats to insist upon complete destruction of her archives. The Board's own archives were also purged pretty thoroughly - for example, you used to be able to see several years of meeting minutes on the website, and now there's less than a year's worth. The minutes are also much less complete than they used to be. 

This is how you know you're on the side of the angels - burning archives to the ground is clearly a thing that good people do, right? 

Side note: Even what they still have posted is messed up - for example, on that list of past meetings, the Dec 11 2023 meeting links to the agenda for Feb 12 2024, and a set of minutes that are *named* Feb 12 2024, but actually describe the meeting of Jan 29 2024. All this with no Feb 12 2024 meeting being in the list of meetings. You actually can still get the Dec 11 2023 documents, but you have to filter the meeting list differently, and then the same link goes to a different document. It's bafflingly terrible. 

All of this had to come to a head eventually. And, sure enough...

Code of Conduct "Violation" #1 - Whistleblowing

(Note: I'm organizing these next few sections by topic, not in chronological order. There's been four separate batches of code of conduct complaints, with a mix of these issues in each.)

My mom eventually got fed up with abuses of the in-camera meeting process, and walked out of an in-camera session in protest, then sent a complaint to the province's ombudsman asking about whether the Board's practices here were acceptable under provincial law. 

As you might imagine, this was an intolerable affront, and the powers that be decided to strike back. The method chosen here was to use the trustee code of conduct. This has become pretty common for school boards across the province who want to make an annoying trustee go away, but most have the decency to pick something the trustee did that was actually bad, and punish them for that. But you can't use that approach if you want to punish someone who didn't do anything wrong, so they just ignored any pretense of doing the right thing. 

Allegedly, going to the ombudsman about potential misuse of closed sessions was a violation of the closed-session rules, which is just absurdity. That argument would imply that nobody can ever challenge them on their use of closed sessions, and they can hide anything they want from public view at any time. I'm not sure if they were trying to get that argument to stand up, or if this is just a naked attempt to punish a whistleblower. Likely a bit of both. 

But whatever the reasons, another trustee put forward a complaint, alleging that my mom had violated half a dozen different sections of the code of conduct. And apparently, the GEDSB's idea of due process is for the hearing to happen in a two-hour closed session where the accused is not allowed to participate in any way. Seriously, this is the actual rule from the code of conduct, section 4.4(f): 

The Trustee who was alleged to have breached the Code of Conduct may be present during the deliberations but shall not participate, answer questions, or vote. 

(Also, two hours? From a board that knocks off the $400M+ annual budget in five minutes? I don't know what happened in that room, but I'd bet good money that the browbeating from the lawyers was truly horrendous.) 

Anyway, after two of Roberto's lawyers did their thing, the other trustees decided to ban my mom from three months of meetings. After twenty years of never missing a single meeting - scheduling family vacations around the meeting schedule, all that - they kicked her out. But that's just the beginning of our sordid little tale. 

Code of Conduct "Violation" #2 - Talking To Her Lawyer

There's apparently a legal principle in Canada called the "Doctrine of Absolute Privilege", which basically says that you can always present all of your evidence to a court. With a name like that, and stating a principle so simple and common-sense, it seems to be pretty bedrock to a lot of Canadian law. 

One of the Code of Conduct complaints was that she had violated Board confidentiality by passing evidence to her lawyer, and having that evidence get submitted to the court. It's not like this was just dumping twenty years of personnel matters and contract negotiations to him (remember how she had to destroy her archives?) - my mom's a pretty sensible person, and only gave him stuff directly related to the case. 

And when the stuff was submitted to the court, and the Board disliked it being filed in a publicly-accessible court document, did they ask for the court to seal it? Nah, they mostly didn't bother. (They did get a couple things sealed, but not nearly all of the things they were complaining about.) 

Also, confidential information was sent to the Board itself, which allegedly let staff members see things they weren't entitled to. But this happened in the context of her lawyer sending legal filings to the board. Does the GEDSB claim that its own staff members are opening things that were clearly marked as legal filings, and rifling through the contents? If so, that seems like a pretty serious failure to supervise. "You've been served" "Ooh, I wonder what's inside!" is not how clerical work is typically done. 

Interlude 1 - Code of Conduct Procedures

It's worth noting that these allegations aren't just absurd, they also fail on a whole host of procedural grounds. In the Code of Conduct, sections 4.2 (b-c), there's three time limits - six weeks to report a complaint, six months to investigate it, and ten days to give the Board that investigation report. Naturally, all three have been violated at various points. The first two are not so bad, relative to everything else - an eight month timeline for an investigation is a sign of a poorly-managed process, and does void the complaint. But compared to everything else, I won't focus too much on it. 

But the Board getting a copy of the investigation report? There's some where it's been over a year, and the report has still not been provided. Indeed, they weren't even available as documents to the court in this hearing, meaning that the GEDSB didn't even want to publicize them in its own defense, against a pretty significant legal challenge. They're probably a bit of a mess for the board's case, I would wager. Which is especially bad, given that the Director's team is picking out these investigators, and I doubt that neutrality is their main goal. If their own people can't even produce a report that makes their side look good, eep.

Instead of providing the report as required, they instead just used PowerPoint slide decks to present the report's findings. Nobody is entirely clear on who prepared these, but it was clearly a biased source, since any evidence for the defense is always mysteriously absent from the slides. Instead, they cherry-pick the heck out of it, exclude anything that might be exculpatory, and present that biased version to the trustees as if it was a complete investigation. 

Also, the trustees never voted for this procedure, it just kind of happened. (Anyone want to bet that it was Roberto and friends who made and submitted the slide deck, and their legal team who shut down any criticisms of it? I don't know for sure, and I doubt the answer is public, but you can make your own guess.) 

Code of Conduct "Violation" #3 - Watching Public Meetings

You remember up at the top, where I said that my mom sat in on meetings even when she wasn't a trustee? As you might imagine, as soon as she was expelled from the board table, she walked back to the public seating area, sat down, and kept observing. That's what you do when you actually care about the topic at hand. 

And at first, this seemed fine. Nobody said anything for a few months, and seeing as she was off the board, she went out into the hall for in-camera sessions. But that was clearly not going to last. (The timelines are complex here, so let's just hit the high points.) 

- My mom, who's had two knee replacements, was ordered to sit on chairs that would obviously not work for her knees. Her failure to follow that order from a random staff member? That's a Code of Conduct complaint. 

- Sitting outside the doors playing Candy Crush while the board is in another long closed session? Apparently that's eavesdropping, so it's a Code of Conduct complaint. Now, I've sat in that exact area myself during closed sessions, and you can't hear the discussion - occasional words at most. And my mom said as much to the investigator, but naturally that defense never made it into the Powerpoint. 

- She wanted to go wait in the kitchen, which has been the traditional hang-out area for decades, and was ordered to go elsewhere, for no apparent reason. (At a later meeting, she was ordered to go *to* the kitchen instead - this is clearly not any kind of coherent principle, it's just arbitrary diktats.) Going to the kitchen anyway? You guessed it, Code of Conduct complaint. 

- Even the fact that she shows up to meetings as a member of the public eventually featured in a Code of Conduct complaint. One trustee complained that "you don't expect someone who was kicked off the board to stick around and watch". And maybe this trustee didn't expect it, but there's no rule against it - if anything, it just shows that my mom actually wants to be there. But again, this was something the board found offensive. 

- She also made a sound once during one meeting (because she bumped her arthritic finger, and it hurt), which was allegedly some form of heckling. Hey look, another Code of Conduct complaint! 

This one has also featured in the punishments. Starting with the third round of punishments, my mom was prohibited from attending meetings. Of note, this included virtual attendance, where eavesdropping and interruption are total non-issues. You can just mute her or go into a private channel, there's no risks there. So any random person halfway around the world can listen to these public meetings, and one member of the board is the only person in the world who can't. This is not an allowable punishment under provincial law, but of course they did it anyway.

Code of Conduct "Violation" #4 - Talking To Her Husband

In the context of that last "eavesdropping" bit above, my mom also called up my dad to complain that the board had tasked a staff member with "babysitting" her. Naturally, the board was offended by this description, and thought it was a slight against board staff. 

Two problems here: 

1) The board later admitted to having sent the staff member there to watch her, so this seems like a pretty accurate description. 
2) This was a private phone call, and happened a ways away from the board room. My mom's not exactly one to bellow into the phone. So I guess the person who reported her was also, ironically, an eavesdropper. 

Interlude 2 - Eternal Damnation

You might have noticed that these allegations are not merely absurd, but also quite numerous. There's a reason for that. Punishments for code of conduct violations are limited under provincial law - basically, they've been operating on the assumption that they can't kick her out for more than three meetings at a time. (They can't even do that right, though - they once banned her from three specific meetings, and used that ban to keep her out of a fourth, unrelated meeting.)

Since the board doesn't meet over the summer, and the first ejection was May 2023, that means that October 2024 is now 14 meetings into the suspension. There's been four separate code of conduct penalties assessed, each for three months, as well as a short period where she was brought back to the table by a provincial judge's court order. 

For some odd reason, the board always seems to find that she's broken the code of conduct about three months since the last time she broke the code of conduct. And it doesn't seem to matter much when the complaint was filed - sometimes it takes eight months to get through the investigation, sometimes it takes three days, but they always seem to get decided right around the time when she might be able to come back to the table. 

Now, maybe that's just a coincidence, but it sure looks to me like there's a very obvious effort to ensure that she is never again allowed to attend any meetings. The board's lawyer has even openly stated that more is pending. I look forward to finding out what the alleged misconduct will be next time - are they going to say that my kindly 67 year old mother is so scary that their hearts might explode if they have to be in the same room? (Is this blog post itself going to feature?) Only time will tell! 

Code of Conduct "Violation" #5 - Answering Constituent Questions

At some point last year, a parent had some questions. The parent had talked to a superintendent (one step below the Director), didn't like the answer they got, so they sent an inquiry to their local trustee. My mom answered with "Her boss is Director Roberto, or you can take your concerns to a board meeting if you prefer - here's the form where you can ask to speak at a meeting." These were public links she gave, nothing even slightly secretive. So naturally, the next code of conduct complaint accused her of violating board secrecy, going against board decisions, and encouraging public condemnation of the board. 

Apparently part of the rationale used here was that the parent in question was part of a fairly sketchy Facebook group. But it was a closed group, and my mom had no way of knowing about it. The whole email chain was only about as long as this section is, it's not like they saw into each other's hearts. 

Code of Conduct "Violation" #6 - Small Talk

Before a meeting, a school principal ran into my mom, and made a comment about how he hoped to see her at his school soon. My mom mentioned that the board had a new policy preventing trustees from vising schools without permission. Which is completely insane, but that is actually what the policy says - here's the Code of Conduct, 1.5 (e-f): 

e) Trustees are not permitted to attend any School or facility within the Grand Erie District School Board without the prior approval of the Director of Education or direction of the Board... 

f) Trustees are not permitted to communicate with Senior Board staff, without the prior approval of the Director of Education or direction of the Board. Senior Board staff includes Supervisory Officers, Principals, Vice-Principals and Managers.

The principal said that was unfortunate, and my mom mentioned that he could talk to his superiors if he wanted something to change. In other words "these are the rules, go through the chain of command to make any complaints" - exactly what someone ought to do here. 

And then a complaint comes in that she had placed the principal in "an awkward situation", and "encouraged criticism of board decisions". The principal denied this and said it wasn't awkward, but that didn't make it into the Powerpoint. And surely people are allowed to disagree with things - one decision doesn't bind everyone's casual commentary for the rest of their lives. That'd be a ridiculous position to argue. 

Legal Action

While a school board is an independent level of government with some self-governing powers, it is not sovereign. In Ontario, the decisions of school boards on things like code of conduct violations are subject to judicial review, and there's been a bunch of cases like this in the last few years (most notably, McNicol, Del Grande, and Ramsay - all of whom acted far worse than my mom is alleged to have done, and all of whom received far lighter punishments from their respective boards, as it happens). 

So after long, long strings of abuses, my mom decided it was time to take the gloves off, and seek a legal remedy. There's been a lot of minor motions here that I won't bore you with, but a few noteworthy things happened along the way. 

First, there was a Board motion that my mom even asking for a judicial review was an abuse of process. They lost that one, of course, with the decision coming down lightning-fast. (Same day as the hearing!) 

Second, there was a hearing on a motion to stay the sanctions, decided back in June of this year. My mom won that, which is why she's been able to attend a few board meetings recently. 

Third, the GEDSB has been oddly slow to get its case ready to be heard. My mom's lawyer was ready for a hearing in the fall of 2023, and my mom was bitterly disappointed when a scheduled hearing this June got delayed until October. But the GEDSB kept saying that it wasn't ready for hearings, despite a much larger legal team working on the case. 

Unfortunately, this isn't too surprising - it's a pretty common strategy for a big organization to try to bleed out small litigants, by delaying the legal process and making it more expensive. The school board is a large organization that has hundreds of millions to play with, whereas my parents have their retirement savings, and not much more. Maybe the board's lawyers are slow and/or incompetent, but maybe they're intentionally dragging their heels in hopes that this all goes away. 

October 29th, 2024

All of the above has led us here, and this is why I'm making this post. My mother finally, after more than a year of waiting, had her day in court on the 29th. And it was a Zoom call, which meant a lot of people could be there. I saw at least eight of the twelve trustees on the call, for example. The Director herself was on the call, along with no less than three Board lawyers (one talked, one who was there as backup, and one who was just observing. I'd love to know how much money the third one charged the board to sit quietly in the audience for seven hours...)

The arguments made by my mom's lawyer are about what you would expect, from my recounting above. A lot of explanations of just how atrocious all of this was, a lot of citations to common-sense legal principles ("Every government agency is required to respect people's constitutional rights", "You can't punish someone multiple times for a single offense", "Decisions need to have a reasonable basis", etc.), and a lot of deep dives into specifics of the above claims. The judges had a few small questions, but overall it seemed pretty tame. 

Then, after lunch, it was the turn of the GEDSB's lawyer. And the questions posed to him were neither small nor tame. Even before he had finished his preamble, the judges were cutting in to ask some pretty pointed questions, mostly on the topic of the whole "Powerpoint summary" issue. They pushed back hard on the question of who actually decides what - in particular, they seemed to be worried that the board was trying to make the investigator into the de facto judge of the case, instead of a true decision being given to trustees. Questions like "Do trustees have to accept the investigator's facts?", "Can the investigator weigh evidence, and choose what to give to the trustees and what to exclude?", and so on came fast and furious - at one point, all three judges were talking over each other in their rush to ask questions. 

I'm no lawyer, but to my eyes the Board's lawyer was really trying to eat his cake and still have it. The board's policy prohibiting trustees from conducting their own investigation featured prominently, but he also went on at length about how trustees are experts in things like the physical layout of the boardroom, and should be respected as experts on questions like that. Not sure how you can square "they can weigh facts from their own personal experience" with "they cannot use their own judgement to try to determine facts", but he sure tried. 

The defenses were also really weak ones. Things like "Just because our procedures are different from every other board, that doesn't mean they're wrong", or "We're an independent body and can make our own rules" (which is a pretty weak argument when you're accused of Charter violations), or "The court will need to decide if this was okay". There was very little in the way of actual positive defenses, or reasons why any of it was supposed to be good. It was the sort of puffery you use when you know you're wrong, and just don't want to be on the hook for it. And then there was the truly spectacular argument that the ability of elected officials to attend their board's meetings "is really a privilege, when you think about it". (And I think that's a direct quote!) 

Also, a fun side note - of the other cases linked above, McNicol is the one where the trustee won in court. And one of the judges from the McNicol case was also the senior judge of the three on my mom's panel. 

Nothing is certain in the world of law, and until the decision is released, we won't know for sure how it went. But I've watched more court proceedings and read more law than almost all non-lawyers, and it looked really bad for the board, to my eyes. 

Final Thoughts

This is not a happy situation. Bluntly, it's awful. The GEDSB has abdicated its responsibility to the students, in favour of pursuing a vendetta against somebody who might make them look bad. They've acted like thin-skinned cowards, to the point where I've actually had a friend ask if the whole thing might be about covering up embezzlement, because this level of secrecy and vengeance is often a big red flag for that kind of criminal activity. (And the friend in question is a Certified Fraud Examiner, not some random guy spewing hot air.)

It's also been pretty expensive. My mom's more than sixty thousand dollars into legal fees at this point, just for her side. And she's been trying to be frugal about it - the board hasn't been frugal at all, so I'd be surprised if it was less than two or three times as much. The "Administration" line of the budget has gone from $7.9M in 2021-22 up to $9.4M in 2024-25, and "Contingency & Non-Operating" has gone from $5.2M to $9.7M over the same period, so there's a lot of room for money to have been spent here. 

Actually, a distant friend of mine from Brantford had heard about the situation, and since he did freedom of information requests professionally, he decided to make an FOI request to see what the board has spent on this litigation. Apparently, the board dismissed his request as "frivolous and vexatious", which is not a plausible reading of the laws, but they clearly didn't want to share the info. They also decided to go look up his social media presence, and reply to his inquiry with a bunch of designations he hadn't used in his request. Which is pretty bloody creepy, I have to say. And if they're trying so hard to cover it up, maybe it's even worse than I think.

I don't know if my mom's planning to launch a GoFundMe or anything - if she does, I'll post it here. (She's doing this for her community, and if the community wants to support her in her efforts, that seems only fair to me.) 

If you want to support her, then the best bet is probably to communicate with trustees - here's the full board, with contact info. If you do, though, please don't be a jerk. These are people who do care about the board, and whose goodwill is important if anything's going to change before the next election. And a number of them have voted against at least some of the Code of Conduct motions - Greg Anderson and Rita Collver have been reliably on the right side (and I'd wager Rita would have been next in line for this kind of treatment if my mom actually had resigned), but others have also opposed a few things here and there. 

Also, in general, keep an eye on your local government. It's not as dramatic as national or world affairs, but if you get the wrong person in, they can screw things up pretty badly. 

Thank you all for reading this far.

Against Decimation

There's been a lot of talk recently about "cancel culture". To pick a prominent recent example, the firing of David Shor seems to have bothered almost everyone - even skeptics of the idea of "cancel culture" seem to mostly think that firing a data analyst for sharing a respectable academic study about how the public reacts to protests was awful. And this isn't the only one - there are lists of many dozens of well-publicized examples out there(here's the best such list I've come across).

This debate really stepped into high gear online with the release of an open letter in Harper's magazine, signed by over a hundred prominent people.  Since then, there's also been a poll of Americans which shows that there's real public concern, on all sides, over this issue. And there's cause for real concern too. A majority of people worry about expressing their views, a majority want to get other people fired for expressing opposing views, and there's a non-trivial amount of overlap between the two groups. And while the left seems somewhat worse, the right is still pretty bad.

Unfortunately, "cancel culture" is a pretty ill-defined term in many ways. Let's look at the Shor case. Is the key part the firing? The fact that it was a left-wing group that got him fired? Was the criticism he got before-hand "cancellation"? How about the part where he got kicked off an email list? That doesn't affect his livelihood, after all.

This is also made more complex because it doesn't take a lot of pressure to really clamp down on people's behaviour. Note that systems like China's "social credit" are largely about going after comparatively small parts of people's lives (buying train tickets, etc.) in order to keep minor dissent down. If you threaten jobs, you'll naturally get even stronger reactions.

If a view has 20% support, and you think people need to be fired for expressing it, you're advocating for 20% unemployment if people aren't cowed. This is awful, but it's also worth noting that it won't even work. You'll merely divide society between those who employ the left and those who employ the right. (This is a big part of why we have Fox News.) So you're basically just exacerbating tensions for no real long-term gain.

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There's some real tension here, between encouraging speech but not encouraging toxic speech, advocating social consequences but not overly severe ones, and a host of other issues. And like all balancing acts, it's tough to get it exactly right. But I think I have a fairly good set of rules that would prevent the worst of it on all sides.

1. People are always allowed to disagree with anything you say, and you should expect them to do so. Simple verbal disagreement(even by large numbers of people) is not "cancellation", and should not be treated as a threat by itself. You need to be able to deal with it.

2. Violence in response to speech is always wrong. This includes inciting others to be violent on your behalf, or credible threats of violence.

3.  Getting people fired in response to speech that's not directly related to their job is usually wrong. In order to be an exception, I think you need to meet the following criteria:

a) The speech must be significantly unpopular. If you start firing people en masse for supporting Biden or Trump, you're basically trying to declare half of society anathema. I would suggest a rule of thumb of 10% support. This is well above the margin of silly responses on polls, so a view that hits 10% actually has real-world support, and it's above the level where the truly loathsome views get to (e.g., open neo-Nazis). But it's well below the level where you'd be opening mainstream views up for cancellation. It's also a convenient round number.

b) More specifically, it must be that unpopular at the time. Dredging up old people's letters to the editor from 1957 about how they were worried about interracial marriage does no good, because they've probably changed their opinions since then, and because you're punishing people for something that wasn't seen as wrong when they did it. There's a reason every decent constitution bans ex post facto punishment.

c) The speech must be truly offensive. Thinking that the world is flat makes you a crank, but it doesn't affect your ability to flip burgers or balance a ledger.

d) And, most importantly, the speech must be theirs. Don't go after people over something their kids or parents wrote - guilt by association is a terrible system.

4. Boycotting and ostracism over speech is often wrong. I won't tell you how to spend your money or who to be friends with, and I won't impose rules as strict as the above on who you ought to support. But stop and consciously consider whether the offense is large enough to justify the response. For boycotts in particular, remember that a firm keeping someone employed is not generally an endorsement of their views, unless they're the firm's spokesperson or CEO.

5. If you have to think about whether you're being a dick, you probably are. Stop and reconsider.

6. Be (sanely) courageous. If someone's speech is threatened, stand up for them if you think you can. This may come at some cost to you, but if nobody will pay that cost, we all lose.

It's important to note that these are not rules any societal agency can enforce. Government will pass no law on this topic, and despite point 6, employers will likely not save people's jobs based on this reasoning. These are rules of how you should act. And, more to the point, these are rules of how I will respond to your cancellation efforts, and how I will try to conduct myself.

That said, I think they're good rules. I haven't seen any better ones out there. And I'll encourage everyone to follow these rules. Stop trying to destroy the 10%.

Balancing the US budget

As a conservative political geek, you hear a lot about the importance of governments balancing their budgets. This is good and proper - fiscal responsibility is a core conservative value - but I think we sometimes make the error of glossing over what's involved in making that happen. Balancing the books isn't supposed to be something we yell at the other side about, it's supposed to be something that we actually try to do. But like a lot of things in politics, it's a lot easier to yell about how the other guy should do it than it is to do it yourself. Since I don't like it when either side acts superior or demands things from others that they can't do themselves, I want us to actually understand what we're asking for, and know how we'd do it.

On this basis, I posted a challenge to balance the US federal budget in a Facebook group a few days ago. (I picked the US budget because the group is mostly American, and because the available data is far better than the Canadian budget). And naturally, as with most of the times I post this sort of thing, I did it and nobody else even tried. It seems like it'd make an interesting long-form blog post, so I figured I'd adapt it to here.

A few notes before we get started.

1) This is really damn hard. The Americans are running a deficit of over a trillion dollars a year, or about 23% of all the money they spend. A lot of the comments I got there were astonishment at how harsh the changes I was proposing were, but frankly I thought I was gentler than was likely to actually happen in practice if someone did demand the deficit get fixed tomorrow.

2) This is going to be ham-fisted. I do not have the full US budget breakdown, and even if I did, I don't have the time or interest to dig into it in the necessary level of detail. I tried to make it realistic-ish, but this cannot be taken as an actual plan that should be implemented by anyone in Congress. And while I tried to make it reasonable, there's probably some stuff here I'd change on a closer analysis even if I didn't have access to any new data sources - this took me a while, and I probably dropped a few balls while I was juggling my priorities.

3) I'm not actually advocating this. Because it's so ham-fisted, and because the impact would be so jarring, I can't say that making the changes I outline below would be a good plan. (The first group might be, but anything beyond that is more scary than pleasant to think about.) This is a thought exercise, not a policy proposal. I want to know what serious cutting looks like, and I want to get a sense of how bad things are, so I know when it might be best to stop pushing for a while.

4) For the same reason as #2, this is going to assume a static analysis of the 2020 budget numbers. I am not the CBO, and I do not have access to models detailed enough to estimate second-order effects of all these changes. In practice, you could safely assume that they'll do a few hundred billion of damage to the bottom line, and leave the county with a deficit like the Bush years. Modest by comparison, though still a bit scary overall. In reality, this would require a substantial phase-in period, but for the sake of this analysis we're assuming that the phase-in has already happened.

5) I'm not making major changes to anything outside of the budget here. We might want to say that(e.g.) they could cut prison spending by legalizing weed, or improve social security's balance by investing their trust fund in the market, but those aren't budget changes, so I didn't consider them.

6) For brevity, all dollar values are in billions, and I've merged some categories. I've rounded things off (the official stats are in millions), but at the level we're working at, the differences are immaterial.

All values are taken from the official GPO budget tables, except where other sources are linked. Section 2 is tax revenues, section 3 is spending.

The Status Quo
TOTAL REVENUES: $3,645
TOTAL SPENDING: $4,746
DEFICIT: $1,101

Revenue breakdown:
Personal income taxes: $1,824

Corporate income taxes: $255

Social Security/Medicare taxes: $1,295

Excise taxes: $109
Alcohol/Tobacco: $23
Obamacare insurer/device taxes: $17
Gas taxes: $43
Airports: $17
Other: $9

Other: $161
Estate/Gift taxes: $19
Customs fees: $48
Fed deposits: $49
Other: $45

Expense Breakdown:
Defence: $738
Personnel: $163
Ops & Maintenance: $290
Procurement: $139
R&D: $100
Atomic energy defense activities: $25
Other: $21

International Affairs: $53
Humanitarian aid: $25
Security aid: $14
Conduct of Foreign Affairs: $13

Science, Space, and Technology: $35
Science: $13
Space flight: $21

Energy: $4

Natural Resources/Environment: $44
Water: $11
Conservation and land management: $13
Recreation: $5
Pollution control: $7
Other: $8

Agriculture: $19
Farm subsidies: $14
Research: $6

Commerce: $-5 (yes, that's negative)

Transport: $101
Ground: $66
Air: $22
Water: $12
Other: $1

Community and Regional Development: $36
Disaster relief: $21
Other: $15

Education and social services: $112
K-12: $43
University: $39
Social services: $19
Training: $7
Other: $4

Health: $1,301
Medicare: $685
Health care services(Medicaid, mostly): $572
Training: $39
Health&Safety: $5

Income Security: $514
Federal employee retirement: $152
Unemployment: $31
Housing assistance: $50
Food assistance: $79
Other income security: $196
Other: $6

Social Security: $1,107

Veterans: $218
Income security for veterans: $110
Healthcare for veterans: $86
Other: $22

Justice: $69
Law enforcement: $37
Litigation and justice activities: $17
Jail: $7
Criminal justice assistance: $9

General government: $32

Debt Interest: $479

Offsetting receipts not included above: $-110 (again, negative)

First Pass - The "Easy" Stuff
For my first pass through the numbers, I made a bunch of changes that I think are actually justified on policy grounds, or at least generally reasonable ways to save money without wrecking things too badly.

- Kill farm subsidies: $14.

- Push education down to the state level: $112.

- Raise gas and airport taxes to equal the related transportation spending: $28.

- Reduce military spending on most things down to 2017 levels (but not R&D or procurement - tech advantages matter): $73.

- Raise Social Security taxes to be high enough to pay for the program's costs long-term(by hiking rates, not the cap on earnings to be taxed): Per the trustee's report, this is a long-term shortfall of 1% of GDP, or about $193, so we'll say that.

- Raise taxes on the rich enough that normal people don't rebel at that last provision. About 17% of national income is earned over the cap(note: 2014 numbers, so it might be a bit higher today), and we'll tax it at a bit higher a rate than the SS tax hike, so say $50.

- Find 5% of the budget to cut in everything except Social Security and debt interest(and the above-cut programs): $148.

---

A separate analysis of tax credits, based on this excellent list of existing tax credits, shows me that there's not a lot of money to be had in tightening up loopholes, but it did find me two provisions I'd be happy to change.

- I'd eliminate estate and gift taxes, but also eliminate the step-up basis on capital gains at death and the carryover basis on gifts. Instead, I'd move to the Canadian system, where death is a deemed disposition. I'm going to make the (likely oversimplified) assumption that these provisions are the only ones affected, so the $19 estate tax revenue is lost in exchange for a $52 capital gains tax at death and $3 on gifts, for a net positive impact of $36.

- Deductions for muni bonds and state and local taxes are silly. $32 in new taxes.

SUB-TOTAL: $686, leaving a deficit of $415

This deals with over half the deficit, but we've used up all of the big headline changes that can be made easily.

Second Pass - Cutting Spending, The Nitty-Gritty
In the first pass, I've done a lot of the fixing with a heck of a lot of tax hikes - $339 of tax hikes, compared to $347 of spending cuts - so I want to focus more on spending cuts for a while.

- Federal employees are pretty numerous - about 2.2 million civilians(see section 16 of the budget tables). Cutting their compensation packages somewhat ought to be doable in the context of a change this large. Let's say we can cut their average all-in compensation (including benefits) by a few grand each. That saves us maybe $7. (Side note: This is a far lower percentage of government expenses than I'd have ever thought. If they all make $100k in total compensation, it's still less than 5% of federal outlays)

- I suspect international aid is probably somewhat too rich for the blood of a nation cutting spending like this. Let's trim it by a quarter, and save $10.

- Environmental policy is important, but there's no way current regulations and spending is done well at all. Cut everything by a quarter, save $11.

- I know healthcare is even more of a third rail for the federal budget than social security, so I'll tread lightly. (I kind of want to raise the Medicare age, but I'd get immolated just for musing about it, so no). The 5% cut imposed above is probably about as much as I could really squeeze it. But I'll drop the training budget by a quarter, and save $10.

- I love science and space flight, but the federal government can't reasonably spend as much as they are. Again, knock off 25%, save $9.

- I excluded military R&D and procurement from the "back to 2017" hammer above, but I don't think I can maintain that. Knock them back down, and after the 5% cut above save $63.

- I'll 2017-ize a lot of other categories as well - stuff that's grown in recent years without any cause I know of, and which can reasonably be pared back by the last few years of growth. (I know this process excludes the impact of inflation and population growth, but that's why they call it "cutting").
> agricultural research
> the USPS
> "other advancement of commerce"
> community development and area development (whatever makes those two separate line items)
> "other income security"(which has grown when all other welfare has stayed flat or dropped)
> income security for veterans (ditto)
> justice, and
> general government.
That's another $82 after the 5% flat cut above.

SUB-TOTAL: $192, leaving a deficit of $223

Third Pass - Grasping Nettles

There's a few categories I've been consciously trying to exempt from my cutting thus far. In particular, welfare and seniors welfare(Social Security/Medicare). While businesses and workers should hopefully be able to adjust to changes, the very poor and retirees are less able to do so. They have minimal income, and thus can't easily cushion themselves. I think I can eliminate the deficit without hitting welfare spending any more than I have above, but seniors can't keep getting a pass. SS and Medicare are 42% of the budget, and so far they've only been 6% of my spending cuts (there was the flat 5% hit to Medicare, for $34). That will have to change.

- Surprisingly, raising the eligibility age isn't the fix here. It's age 67 for SS(nominally), but making Medicare also age 67 will help less than I expected. The CBO has an analysis, and while it doesn't give annual details out to age 67, the age-66 effect would be $5 in improvement to the deficit (because most of the savings would be lost to Obamacare subsidies, or net tax impacts). So let's say we get the same from the extra year, and pushing it to age 67 will save us $10.

- That means we're means-testing. If we implement a clawback designed so that the top 5% of earners lose their benefits entirely and the next 10% lose an average of half, that saves us 10% on the budget for each. That's $175.

SUB-TOTAL: $185, leaving a deficit of $38

With that, cuts to SS/Medicare are now $219 billion, or 30% of total spending cuts. This is still on the low side compared to their share of the budget, but I think that's proper policy - they shouldn't be expected to carry as much of the burden as working-age people.

While I'm grasping nettles, let's do this right. Employer health insurance being tax deductible is a $215 tax hit. I don't want to unwind that totally, but I think 10% inclusion is reasonable - if your employer spends $10k on your group benefits, you're taxed as if you earned $1k. If nothing else, this should help make people see what the cost of the benefits is. This is $22 in new revenue.

One I was eyeing earlier is a tax credit for increasing research expenses. I think that might be a good target - it's probably a lot of admin overhead for companies, and this sort of thing is usually just a way for politicians to talk about how they're supporting the economy. Besides, the left will go crazy if we don't hit corps at least a little bit. That's $16 if we axe it.

SUB-TOTAL: $38, leaving no deficit!

The Results

Total spending cuts are $724 billion(15.2% of the budget), and total tax hikes are $377 billion(10.3% of federal taxes). The new federal budget is $4.022 trillion per year. And I'm being strung up by an angry coalition of government employee unions, socialists, anti-tax crusaders, seniors, soldiers, and modern monetary theorists. Isn't life grand?

TOTAL REVENUES: $3,645 > 4,022
TOTAL SPENDING: $4,746 > 4,022
DEFICIT: $1,101 > 0

REVENUE BREAKDOWN:
Personal income taxes: $1,824 > 1,929 (high earners tax, muni/SALT elimination, employer health insurance deduction down to 90%)

Corporate income taxes: $255 > 271 (ending research expansion tax credit)

Social Security/Medicare taxes: $1,295 > 1,488 (SS breakeven tax hike)

Excise taxes: $109 > 137
-Alcohol/Tobacco: $23 > 23
-Obamacare insurer/device taxes: $17 > 17
-Gas taxes: $43 > 66 (pay for ground transport)
-Airports: $17 > 22 (pay for air transport)
-Other: $9 > 9

Other: $161 > 197
-Estate/Gift taxes: $19 > 55 (in cap gains taxes)
-Customs fees: $48 > 48
-Fed deposits: $49 > 49
-Other: $45 > 45

EXPENSE BREAKDOWN: (All cut by 5% unless otherwise stated)
Defence: $738 > 568 (all 2017'd)
-Personnel: $163 > 137
-Ops & Maintenance: $290 > 233
-Procurement: $139 > 99
-R&D: $100 > 65
-Atomic energy defense activities: $25 > 19
-Other: $21 > 15

International Affairs: $53 > 39
-Humanitarian aid: $25 > 17 (extra 25% cut)
-Security aid: $14 > 10 (extra 25% cut)
-Conduct of Foreign Affairs: $13 > 12

Science, Space, and Technology: $35 > 24 (extra 25% cut)
-Science: $13 > 9
-Space flight: $21 > 15

Energy: $4 > 4

Natural Resources/Environment: $44 > 31 (extra 25% cut)
-Water: $11 > 8
-Conservation and land management: $13 > 9
-Recreation: $5 > 3
-Pollution control: $7 > 5
-Other: $8 > 6

Agriculture: $19 > 4
-Farm subsidies: $14 > 0 (killed)
-Research: $6 > 4 (2017'd)

Commerce: $-5 > -19 (USPS and other advancement of commerce 2017'd)

Transport: $101 > 96
-Ground: $66 > 63
-Air: $22 > 21
-Water: $12 > 11
-Other: $1 > 1

Community and Regional Development: $36 > 29
-Disaster relief: $21 > 20
-Other: $15 > 9 (2017'd)

Education and social services: $112 > 0 (all moved to states)

Health: $1,301 > 1,147
-Medicare: $685 > 572 (means testing, eligibility at age 67)
-Health care services(Medicaid, mostly): $572 > 543
-Training: $39 > 27 (extra 25% cut)
-Health&Safety: $5 > 5

Income Security: $514 > 467
-Federal employee retirement: $152 > 144
-Unemployment: $31 > 29
-Housing assistance: $50 > 48
-Food assistance: $79 > 75
-Other income security: $196 > 165 (2017'd)
-Other: $6 > 6

Social Security: $1,107 > 996 (means testing, but no 5% cut)

Veterans: $218 > 185
-Income security for veterans: $110 > 82 (2017'd)
-Healthcare for veterans: $86 > 82
-Other: $22 > 21

Justice: $69 > 55 (all 2017'd)
-Law enforcement: $37 > 28
-Litigation and justice activities: $17 > 14
-Jail: $7 > 7
-Criminal justice assistance: $9 > 6

General government: $32 > 23 (2017'd)

Debt Interest: $479 > 479 (no 5% cut)

Offsetting receipts not included above: $-110 > -117 (cut to federal employee compensation included here)

---

And, as one final note, I'd like to point out that the Transportation budget has four categories - Ground, Air, Water, and Other.

What the hell goes under Other?

The other three match three of the four classical elements, so is this the federal investment in Floo powder?

Freedom's Responsibility

For anyone who hasn't heard the news, a bunch of racist assholes attacked a pair of mosques in New Zealand, killing (last I heard) 49 people. Complete with a live video feed, creepy racist manifestos, and all the other accouterments of terrorist murderers everywhere.

Naturally, the world arose in near-unanimous condemnation of this horrible crime, and rightly so. But I've noticed one thing in the responses gathering a lot of attention - a lot of politicians (mostly on the right, sad to say) seem weirdly reluctant to use "Muslim" or "mosque" to describe the victims. A typical response that got a lot of flak was the pair of tweets from Tory leader Andrew Scheer. The focus is on freedom of religion, not on racists massacring Muslims.

The implication is that this is about fitting this tragedy into their worldview, which has a distinct emphasis on freedom of religion(especially for Christians - almost exclusively for Christians, if you look at the examples that many of these people will inevitably pick. See, for example, Bernier's painfully bad tweet). But it's not about the actual victims, the 49 dead Muslims who were murdered for praying in a mosque.

The flip side of this is the left's view, where it's all about Islamophobia, and freedom of religion is nowhere to be seen. For example, Jagmeet Singh's response. This likewise fits into their worldview where Islamophobia and white supremacy are major threats to the body politic, so likewise it'll naturally be their focus. It's unusual for me to say this, but the left is acting better here, on the whole. They're actually condemning the killers and the ideology that spawned them, and that's the first thing that should happen in any awful crime like this. The root cause of murder is murderers, full stop. (Would that they behaved this way all the time, but I'll give credit when credit's due.)

It really bothers me how badly people are dropping the ball on religious freedom, though. All the discussion I've seen today about this, and about the ham-fisted posts from right-leaning figures, has focused on how they're using freedom of religion as a dodge, a way to avoid taking their ideology the blame for this, and a way to co-opt the tragedy to talk about their pet issues. And a lot of them totally are. But in so doing, they make it seem like religious freedom is just a tool to defend their own beliefs from attack, not a critically important general principle. (Though the limits of Twitter as a medium are also apparent here - when simply typing the word "Muslim" is over 2% of your entire post length, sometimes people might cut it for brevity with no ill intent.)

Religious freedom isn't about the right to choose between boring mainstream denominations like Catholic and Lutheran. The modern concept of religious freedom traces back, at least in part, to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended one of the bloodier wars in history. For thirty years, Europe had torn itself to shreds, in large part over religious hatreds. This was an era where you could easily be forced to convert at the point of a gun or sword several times in our life, and where wars were fought over and over again about which religious doctrine would hold sway. The result was a shattered region, some eight million dead bodies, and a general agreement that it simply wasn't worth it to fight a death struggle over religion.

Religious freedom is about the right to choose between Catholic and Lutheran in Europe, in 1648. When they weren't "boring" at all, but were instead sparks that led to major international warfare. When your nation could be ransacked for choosing the wrong language for your Bibles, the right to choose it was a real and important right, and protection of it was key. That conflict has long since died away, and excites no serious passions today. But the principle still matters, because other religious conflicts can kill people just as dead even today. Especially today, as we saw in New Zealand.

A tweet about religious freedom that avoids mentioning Islam and co-opts it to be about Christianity is doing a disservice to everyone involved. Religious freedom is important because it protects Muslims too. In the modern developed world, Islam is "scary" in the sort of way that Lutheranism was "scary" in 1640s Italy - not because it's somehow inherently bad, but because a lot of people worry about it.

Freedom of religion isn't about the denomination itself. It's about freedom of opinion, of conscience, and of belief. It's about taking those cherished freedoms and applying them to everyone, even when we find their views odd. I don't doubt that there are people out there who aren't true Islamophobes, but who find Islam confusing and a bit scary nonetheless. But religious freedom is the principle that even when you think a viewpoint is bizarre or a bit offensive, you let people have it. You don't persecute them, you don't try to kick them out of your society, and you sure as hell don't massacre them by the dozen.

Using "freedom of religion" as a club to advance the interests of your personal religion is a great way to throw away the moral authority of impartial protection of human rights. You take something we've slowly worked towards for centuries and burn it away instead of building it up. The moral authority of freedom of religion won't protect you from your critics if you refuse to extend those same protections to those you criticize(or want to criticize, if you thought you could get away with it).

The left has the correct explanation for today's tragedy. But the right has the correct path forward - respecting the right of people to hold any view they want to hold, and participate peacefully in society. I just wish the sort of right-leaning figures that I'm thinking of would realize that they had the right answer and act accordingly, instead of acting like cheap partisan hacks with something to hide. It'd work a lot better if you were giving something up to build the principle that will defend you, instead of just having your hand out to collect all the goodwill that's been invested by other people over the last 400 years.

Tales of an Amateur Dev

I've dabbled in coding before, but never done anything serious - the biggest project I've ever worked on was a version of Risk I coded in Turing for a highschool class back in 1999. But it's always been something that's interested me, and it's possible that my career might take me in that direction somewhere down the line, so it's a skill set I've wanted to build for a while.

A project just came across my horizon that I think I'm going to work on - basically, it's an application for a tabletop game, but one that can get very complex by the time it's done due to the number of different advanced rule sets/unit types/etc. that are available in this game. This project is really ambitious by the standards of my current skill level, and it may well be beyond what I can do well. However, even if I fall out halfway through I'll probably learn a ton, and if it succeeds there may even be a second income stream in it for me.

This blog post will be rather different than anything else I've posted here, but if you want to see my ramblings and false starts, come join me. This is intended to be something of a notebook of my experiences, as well as perhaps being a useful guide to anyone else who wants to follow in my footsteps.

Project Overview

The game I'm building for is BattleTech - it's a tabletop wargame, based around giant stompy death robots, but it's got add-ons for everything from infantrymen to two million ton space battleships. The goal for the intial version is to be able to make units of the most common types, with a convenient and modern UI. Once that's complete, more unit types will be added, as well as more utilities that players may value - the ability to turn individual units into larger forces, the ability to organize the logistics for those larger forces, the ability to build their own imaginary factions and select common designs and the like for them, and so on. Once that's done, I'd ideally like to integrate a rules database, fictional references lookup, and so on. All of this should be easy to use for an end user - just a simple download-and-install, no need to set up a Java environment or anything.

In a perfect world, this program ought to run on all major OSes(both desktop and mobile), be easy to integrate new expansions into, take input and provide output in all the most common formats used by players, and be superior in terms of both usability and breadth of options to all its competitors. Obviously, this is a hell of a request list, and I don't anticipate it'll happen right away. For one, having the same program work on desktop and mobile is a nightmare - that was what Windows 8 was built for, and Windows 8 was a failure. If Microsoft can't do it, neither can I.

So, the architecture seems like it ought to be divided into three parts.

• The database, which contains all the various units, weapons, rule write-ups, and so on. 
• The back end, which does the actual calculations, output to other programs, and the like. 
• The front end, which gives the user an interface to make everything actually happen. 

As I understand it, the database and back end should be universal, as long as I pick the right tools. The front end will be extremely different on desktop and mobile, but as long as everything is properly modular, that's the only thing that should need to change. I'll be starting with desktop, as it's both more forgiving and easier to test. 

Tools

I've started this project with the intention of using C# as the primary coding language, building it within Visual Studio's free Community edition. There's a good selection of libraries and support tools, I have some experience with both language and environment, and it seems that the expansion to other OSes is fairly easy(from what I've read, Xamarin for Visual Studio will let you turn C# code into iOS/Android apps, which looks like an easier transition to mobile than any other I've come across). 

For the database, my intention is to use SQLite. I don't have much experiences with databases of any sort, but it seems to be the de facto standard for building a relational database into an application without need for any central database server. And again, it's very well supported, and free to use. This is a Visual Studio plugin that seems to implement it. (Edit: Nope, that's a bunch of tools, but not the actual implementation. I'll update this when I find what I want.)

Getting the same version to work on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems ought to be possible, and a helpful soul pointed me in the direction of wxWidgets, which seemingly has a C# version. I don't know exactly what I'll be doing here, but that seems like a promising lead. 

Any of these may turn out to be mistakes, but I'll start there and see what happens. 

Architecture

Designing something that's intended to be this thoroughly expandable is a challenge I've never dealt with. Most of the time I've just done straight A to B programming, brute-forcing things freely and hard-coding all over the place. Doing long-term maintenance on a few workplace projects has started to move me away from those habits, but I'll need to jump far, far away from them for this to work right. 

The plan right now is to use plain-text definition files of some sort, one for each different type of unit. Those files will create a list of things the unit type must have and a list of what they may have, with caps on each(e.g., you can only have one engine, but you can have dozens of weapons). These will be as soft-coded as I can manage, because the number of optional rules and add-ins means that anything I hard-code will need to be torn apart and replaced down the line. 

The structure of the database will also be a big concern. A lot of things can be used on many different types of units, so making sure that the database that stores them is properly set up for flexibility down the line will be quite important. I think each "class" of weapon(infantry, mech, artillery, naval, etc.) will have its own table, and each sub-class(e.g., all AC/2-class weapons, of which there are several types with overlapping ammunition options) will be given a label within that class. Special rules that apply to some weapons, or some ammo types, will have their own table, and a many-many relationship will be set up between them to keep it all straight and prevent inconsistencies from sneaking in. Ideally, each rule should be defined exactly once, and everything that uses it will just reference the master entry. 

Getting Started

To start, I downloaded Visual Studio, installing the ".NET Desktop Development" package. It was about a 3.5 GB install. The list I originally wanted (with Xamarin etc.) was close to 40 GB, so I figured I'd hold off on those to avoid blowing up my internet's download cap. 

Once I got it downloaded, I created a project as a "Windows Forms App (.NET Framework)", as that seems to be a decent UI option from a quick Google image search. I needed to create a new folder outside the Visual Studio folder to store the actual project in, as my original attempt to make a sub-folder was blocked. I made sure to tick off the option to add it to version control, as a VCS is a must for any kind of serious coding - it seems to use Git, which I've dabbled with before, and which is as good as any. Once that was done and I was properly into Visual Studio, I installed the SQLite plugin through the extensions manager and rebooted the program. 

The crazy part is that this has been a big focus of mine for the last day and a half, but after all this work and planning, I still haven't written a single line of code yet. But I know where I'm going, and I have some reasonable-sounding ideas for how to get there. Let's see how this goes. 

Predictions for 2017 - Analysis

One of the first posts I made on this blog was a set of 50 predictions for 2017, each with probabilities attached. Now it's time to see how I did.

CANADIAN POLITICS
1) Maxime Bernier will win the CPC leadership - 50%
Result: WRONG. Close, but wrong.
2) Kellie Leitch will not win the CPC leadership - 80%
Result: RIGHT. Given how she actually did, I actually feel under-confident here.
3) There will be 5 or fewer candidates on the final CPC leadership ballot - 60%
Result: WRONG. I misunderstood the process, and didn't realize how little reason to drop out there was, or how early you had to drop out.
4) Jason Kenney will win the PCAA leadership - 90%
Result: RIGHT.
5) The PCAA and Wildrose parties will not have begun any official merger process - 70%
Result: WRONG.
6) There will be no Danielle Smith-style defection of multiple Wildrose MLAs to the PCAA(or vice-versa) - 90%
Result: RIGHT.
7) There will be less than 3 candidates who formally register for the federal NDP leadership - 80%
Result: WRONG. This one was somewhat snarky on my part, and I let it mess with my judgement.
8) The expected 2017-18 deficit announced in the 2017 federal budget will be higher than predicted in the 2016 budget($29.0 billion) - 70%
Result: WRONG. It was actually $28.5 billion, so close, but wrong.
9) The expected 2017-18 deficit announced in the 2017 Ontario budget will be higher than predicted in the 2016 budget(balanced) - 70%
Result: WRONG. It seems they might actually run a deficit, but they didn't predict one, so this fails.
10) Approval of the performance of Justin Trudeau will be below 50% in at least one major scientific poll - 80%
Result: RIGHT. It was a squeaker, though.

GLOBAL POLITICS
11) The UK will invoke Article 50 and begin the formal Brexit process - 95%
Result: RIGHT.
12) Theresa May will remain PM of the UK - 99%
Result: RIGHT. That said, this one is case in point for why 99% is the highest certainty allowed in this scheme. This came shockingly close to failing.
13) There will be no second referendum on Brexit, actual or planned - 99%
Result: RIGHT.
14) The UK will initiate public talks with at least five non-EU nations for free trade deals - 80%
Result: I can't find any convenient list of deals underway. There's definitely talks with the US, and seemingly at least some PM-level discussions with Japan, but I can't find an easy way to judge this as either true or false. Which means it's probably false, to be fair.
15) No public process for a CANZUK free trade/free movement agreement will have begun - 80%
Result: RIGHT. A bit fuzzy on my phrasing, but governments haven't made any serious steps that I can see.
16) No deal will be reached between the UK and the EU on the terms of Brexit - 95%
Result: WRONG. They reached a deal in December.
17) No other nation will decide to leave the EU or Eurozone - 80%
Result: RIGHT.
18) Marine Le Pen will make it to the French Presidential runoff election - 60%
Result: RIGHT.
19) Marine Le Pen will not win the Presidency of France - 95%
Result: RIGHT. No surprises here - 30% of the population likes the alt-right and 70% hates them in most countries, and they were always going to unify behind whoever the sane one was.
20) Angela Merkel will be re-elected Chancellor of Germany - 70%
Result: RIGHT. Pretty close, which was expected(hence my comparatively low confidence here), but she made it.
21) There will be at least one explicitly Islamic terrorist attack killing 50+ people in the OECD - 70%
Result: WRONG. There were several nasty attacks, but the highest number killed by any was 39. This is one where I'm glad to be wrong, of course, but wrong I am.
22) There will be no terrorist attack killing 500+ people in the OECD - 90%
Result: RIGHT.
23) ISIS will remain a de facto nation with control of at least some territory - 80%
Result: RIGHT. Not a lot, but there's a few areas in Syria that they still hold(the grey parts on this map).
24) The US will continue to attack ISIS(at least until all their territory is lost) - 90%
Result: RIGHT.
25) The US will not begin any substantial new conflicts(Libya 2011 or larger) - 80%
Result: RIGHT.
26) Approval of the performance of Donald Trump will be above 50% in at least one major scientific poll in the last three months of the year - 80%
Result: WRONG. Again, I let my cynicism get the better of me. The highest I can find is 46%.
27) The US Senate will eliminate the filibuster for at least some votes - 70%
Result: RIGHT. The Gorsuch vote went nuclear.
28) The US will withdraw some form of support from the anti-Russian nations of Eastern Europe - 80%
Result: WRONG. Trump has been better than I thought he would be here.
29) No nuclear weapons will be used against civilian targets - 95%
Result: RIGHT. Thankfully so.
30) At least one world leader will be elected on a populist campaign routinely mentioned alongside Trump and Brexit - 80%
Result: WRONG. I can't think of any examples, at least.

MAJOR EVENTS
31) Using the same methodology as my discussion of 2015-16 celebrity deaths, at least 10 celebrities will die - 90%
Result: RIGHT. 15 people, average age 62, which actually makes it slightly worse than 2016. (The list is David Cassidy(67), Tom Petty,(66), Malcolm Young(64), Roy Halladay(40), John Heard(71), Chester Bennington(41), Chris Cornell(52), Stephen Furst(53), John Hurt(77), George Romero(77), Gregg Allman(69), Bill Paxton(61), Richard Hatch(71), Jimmy Snuka(73), and Gord Downie(53)).
32) Canada will not have a natural disaster as devastating as the 2016 Aberta wildfires - 80%
Result: RIGHT.
33) No major green energy breakthrough(>50% improvement in output per dollar) - 90%
Result: RIGHT.
34) Global average temperature is higher than 2016 - 80%
Result: WRONG. 0.1 degrees cooler. That said, looking at recent history, I'd say this was pretty well-calibrated.
35) No natural disaster will kill 10,000 or more people - 80%
Result: RIGHT. The deadliest was the South Asian flooding, that killed about 1,200.
36) No natural disaster will kill 100 or more people in the OECD - 90%
Result: WRONG. There was an earthquake in Mexico City that killed 225.
37) There will be at least one computer security breach affecting 50 million or more accounts - 80%
Result: RIGHT. The Equifax breach was 143 million accounts.
38) No film released in 2017 will have a global box-office gross over $1.5B - 50%
Result: RIGHT. The highest was Star Wars: The Last Jedi, at $1.32 billion. (It's still in theatres, but it made $3M last week, so I don't think I need to worry).
39) The MSCI All-Cap World Index index will increase faster than inflation in USD - 60%
Result: RIGHT. Substantially faster, actually - it grew 23.16%.
40) 2017 will be the most prosperous year in human history - 95%
Result: RIGHT. Global real GDP per capita grew 2.5% last year, as it has grown every year since 2009.

PERSONAL LIFE
41) I will be married - 95%
Result: RIGHT. :D
42) Our wedding will be under budget - 70%
Result: RIGHT. Substantially so, which was really nice.
43) I will have a full-time job - 95%
Result: RIGHT. This was a riskier one at the time than I wanted to really admit to myself, because when I wrote the original list, I didn't. But I was confident of my ability to find one.
44) I will have a permanent full-time job - 80%
Result: RIGHT. And rightly so!
45) I will no longer be doing financial plans as a side job - 70%
Result: RIGHT. Not something you can do when you're employed by a bank.
46) I will still be posting Friday Night Videos - 95%
Result: WRONG. Sorry, folks.
47) I will be making regular blog posts - 70%
Result: WRONG. Clearly, I fell off that wagon.
48) I will have a new desktop computer - 80%
Result: RIGHT. Got it back in August, and it's wonderful.
49) I will have my CFP and CFA - 80%
Result: WRONG. I have the necessary experience, but I've been procrastinating on my paperwork for it.
50) I will complete the design of at least one game - 60%
Result: WRONG. Too distracted by other stuff. But I still have a bunch in the works.

So, to summarize:
50% Confidence: 
1 right (#38), 1 wrong(#1) = 1/2 = 50%. Perfectly calibrated.
60% Confidence: 
2 right(#18 and 39), 2 wrong(#3 and 50) = 2/4 = 50%. Perfect calibration is 2.4 correct, so this is the best result that can be managed with this few guesses.
70% Confidence: 
4 right(#20, 27, 42, and 45), 5 wrong (#5, 8, 9, 21, and 47) = 4/9 = 44%. Overconfident, best result would be 6/9 correct.
80% Confidence: 
12 right(#2, 10, 15, 17, 23, 25, 28, 32, 35, 37, 44, and 48), and 5 wrong (#7, 26, 30, 34, and 49) = 12/17 = 71%. Best result would be 14 correct. (If we treat #14 as wrong instead of null, this is 12/18 = 67%, best result still 14 correct).
90% Confidence: 
#4 right, #6 right, #22 right, #24 right, #31 right, #33 right, #36 wrong,
6 right (#4, 6, 22, 24, 31, and 33), and 1 wrong(#36) = 6/7 = 86%. Still best possible result.
95% Confidence: 
#11 right, #16 wrong, #19 right, #29 right, #40 right, #41 right, #43 right, #46 wrong,
6 right(#11, 19, 29, 40, 41, and 43), 2 wrong (#16 and 46) = 6/8 = 75%. Overconfident, best result would be 8/8.
99% Confidence: 
2 right(#12 and 13), no wrong = 100%. Best result.

Overall, I'm somewhat overconfident, and predicted an average of 39 correct answers, when I only got 33 right. The 70% and 95% brackets in particular were bad for me. I suspect this is still better than most people would manage, but I think I can do better - a few of my mistakes seem obvious in retrospect. Also, I may want to change up what I guess on in order to spread things out a bit - there weren't many data points at either end, and that makes it tougher to know if I did well by luck or skill.

Friday Night Video: Grande Amore

I can't sleep on planes. Or at least, I seem to be unable to - the first time I ever took a flight that might justify sleeping, I decided to leave at 10 PM for a trans-Atlantic flight in hopes of making sure I could sleep. No dice. (Wandering one of the great cities of the world for the first time when you've been awake for close to 30 hours is not the way I'd want to do things if I was going to do it all over again, I must say)

Thing about planes is that you're sort of limited in entertainment. The in-flight movies are often not great, your phone has limited battery, and I think I finished one book and got bored of the other. So I started listening to the music selections. And boy, was it ever a mixed bag. But in the process, I did discover one band that's rather interesting - not quite my normal style, but it hit the spot somehow. Good thing about foreign carriers, they're a good way to discover foreign-language music.

Friday Night Video: Mr. Crowley

Halloween is a weird little holiday. Kids dress up as an excuse to get candy, university students dress up as an excuse to get drunk, and adults dress up their houses as an excuse to show off. For all that it's ostensibly spooky, it's really quite a silly endeavour in many ways.

Still, the silliest ones are probably the ones who take the spooky a bit too seriously. Occult stuff is an amusing thematic element at the end of October, but the rest of the year it's really easy to jump over the line from thematic and atmospheric straight into sad and cheesy. One of the musicians below seems to mostly dress up in occulty stuff for shock value(and biting the head off a bat on-stage was just an unfortunate accident), while the other seems to take it very seriously, but both seem to like referencing occultists, and both make decent music(at varying levels of weird) while doing so.

(And I know that in past, I've tried to make catch-up Friday Night Videos be multiple songs with the same title. Let's just say that, while I may not be into the occult, there's forms of weirdness I do enjoy, like making in-jokes for my own amusement.)

Friday Night Video: Fully Completely

It's depressing how many of my videos are posted because some musician I'm fond of died. Some are shocking, some are sadly unsurprising, but they're all depressing.

Unlike most, we knew this one was coming. Cancer is a bitch like that. But despite that, it's sad to know that one of our nation's greatest musicians isn't with us any more. Gord Downie, you will be missed.

(That said, do you know how confusing it is when the person breaking the news to you calls him Robert Downey by mistake?)

Friday Night Video: Link

Back in the olden days, when we used to get our music delivered by brontosaurus, I heard this wacky little song about Zelda games and thought it was pretty catchy. The weird part was that it was attributed to System of a Down, of all people. I can sort of see why, but hearing that this insanely heavy band(at least by the standards of what I'd ever heard back then) was doing wacky gaming songs kind of blew my mind. There's no way that nerdy stuff like gaming would be so popular as to make it to music by popular bands, is there. (Again, how little I knew...)

Sadly, this is not a System of a Down song. It's by this group of nobodies, which got passed around on false under a false name...and yet, probably drove 100x as much traffic to The Rabbit Joint as anything else they ever did, when people went to SoaD sites to figure out where it was from and got corrected. The old saying about how "there's no such thing as bad publicity" apparently even applies sometimes when you're not the one getting the publicity.

But hey, it's a cute little track, and someone on Youtube made a cute little video to go along with it. Why not have some fun?