Stupidity in the news

There’s stupidity in the news every day, but I usually don’t see it in what little news I read. Yesterday seemed to be a day for me to encounter an unusual amount of it.

Just to show that idiocy in the legal system isn’t the sole purview of the US legal system, there’s this headline from Quebec: Court quashes dad’s grounding of 12-year-old daughter.

A father plans to appeal after a Quebec court ruled that he didn’t have the right to punish his 12-year-old daughter by barring her from a school trip.

And if that’s not enough, Senators approve anti-spanking bill.

Bill S-209, which needs House approval to be made into law, proposes to eliminate Section 43 of Canada’s Criminal Code, which allows parents, teachers and caregivers to use reasonable force to discipline a child and correct their behaviour.

Srsly. W. T. F.

And in my home town of Edmonton, city councillors are, IMO, making some very short sighted decisions about the iconic electric trolley buses that have ferried people through Edmonton’s downtown for decades.

After gliding quietly along Edmonton streets for 70 years, the city’s fleet of trolley buses will be taken off the road for good, city council has decided.

Why are they going away? Because a bean counter somewhere has projected that over the next 18 years, the fleet of electric buses will cost $100M more to maintain than replacing them with diesel or hybrid buses. That’s a little less than $5.6M/year. City Council probably fritters away twice that much on other things. The trolley buses are efficient, quiet and non-polluting (yes, their electricity comes from a fossil-fuel burning power plant, but it’s also generating the power that goes to your house at the same time) compared to diesel hybrids which, while producing less emissions than a regular diesel bus are still nonetheless spitting out pollution.

Where do you suppose gas/diesel prices are going in the next 18 years?


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