As a former Greenpeacer, I’m in favour of charging by weight. For one thing, it’ll encourage recycling, and for another it’ll penalize those people who throw away food (it’s quite heavy) and buy overpackaged stuff.

I would be in favour of the chips if I thought for a minute that they’d be removed upon the conclusion of the service period. But they won’t be; you KNOW they won’t be. And this is what the government will use to encourage everyone to get chipped (“Saves lives! Look at these brave soldiers; if not for their chips, they’d be dead!” etc etc).

War on cars? I’m there, baby! The only downside is that it does tend to split people along class lines, with the rich paying the congestion fees, etc. I would be all about having an “entry fee” for downtown.

As for the examples of criminality Steven L lists, they could be avoided by having this a public service, rather than handled by private corporations. This is a perfect example of why such things shouldn’t be contracted out.

Steven, my student loan was taken out in an earlier age, at a time of record high interest rates. The junk-bond era. But I really didn’t think it would apply to the study of chemistry and philosophy, but it did.

As for the effect of oil on mortgage rates, I am proud to say that I seriously, really and truly do not give a rat’s ass. It would be worth a great deal to me if every real estate conversationalist in the world dropped off the face of the planet immediately.

Re: tagging soliders, what if the enemy catch onto the technology and can use your tag to aim at you in the dead of night?

Raincoaster – does your student loan not change rates to reflect world energy prices / interest rates / inflation etc? Or have you been well and truly screwed?

Base lending rate was 3.5% not long ago, about that time property was rising at up to and sometimes over 20% / year. People were getting all worked up thinking that if they didn’t buy they would never be able to and that property would keep climbing like that because Gordon Brown was so good at keeping interest rates low.

Oil was $40 a barrel then, it’s over $70 now, interest rates have crept to 4.75% and think they will creep to 5.5% at least. If it kicks off with Iran oil will rise more and so will interest rates and those poor fools that didn’t listen to me will get their houses repo’d. I won’t have any sympathy for them because I’m fed of of listening to people talk about house prices. I’m hoping for 6% base lending rates this time next year at least. It’s the same people watching their house prices are sayinghow good mass immigration is – it’s good for thei house prices bad for low paid workers and people struggling to find somewhere decent to rent even. Send them home, invade Iran!

Re. Fingerprinting kiddies–seems like a direct violation of several rights, but particularly the parents’. I’d sure as hell have words with a kindergarten that fingered my kid. I might go for an RFID chip in the kid’s baby tooth–that way we’d be sure it was leaving eventually, and before the age at which a kid needs to keep secrets from adults, really.

Unfortunately, since the regulatory framework that would satisfy me as to the line between safety and privacy is not yet in place, I have to thunder against.

Re. Garbage cans: If the council provides the bins (as they do in parts of my old home town, Victoria), then I think it’s really up to them.

But honestly, no-one cares about garbage privacy. Otherwise they’d take more care with what they put out and how they package it. Garbagemen already know all your secrets; I can still give you family size, members’ ages, and approximate income levels, from seeing the contents of a trash bin.

Throw in the recycling bins and I’ll tell you their shoe size, number and type of valid credit cards and the number of cell phones in the house.

Speaking as someone who slung bins for a living, I think people don’t get half the kicking around they deserve vis-a-vis wrong stuff in bins. We used to leave a happy little sticker on the bins explaining that actually, used auto parts weren’t supposed to be left out with the tin cans and no, styrofoam egg cartons were not actually cardboard … no-one paid a blind bit of notice.

As for charging by weight, I say hell yeah. On a side note: WCB regs said the most a bag should weigh was about 60 lbs. I leave it to you to decide whether clients A) Slavishly followed this rule or B) Ignored it when it proved inconvenient.

@ Steven_L: As for the “war on cars”–the Economist, that left-wing loony journal, seems to think it’s a good idea to actually make people pay for what they use, including the streets of a crowded, high-density city whose road infrastructure was well-established long before the advent of the car.

Canada need more ideas like this. In 2005, as the bottom dropped out of the SUV market in the states, our “green” countrypersons bought more of them and drove them farther. How bad are we at saving energy? The latest rush of home “reno” is the driveway heater.

That is, in a country where 80% of us see snow each year, people are opting to pour electricity into their driveways to save on getting exercise or paying someone (less) to do it.

It’s time we started making people responsible for their consumption directly. We’d soon see some savings, and a lot of savage bitchery. Imagine if you had to pay a congestion charge for crossing the Port Mann or the Lion’s Gate bridges at 7:30 AM!

You see Gordon Brown asked the banks to run our economy because he is economically illiterate. So the banks do whats good for banks (i.e. keep inflation down and send house prices through the roof so they have lots of equity to secure loans on) and tell Gordon Brown that inflationary pay rises will ruin the economy.

So all the nurses and policemen that can’t afford homes don’t get ‘inflationary pay rises’ because the unions won’t argue against their hero Gordon Brown.

But hopefully the high price of oil should see an end to all this nonsense. When interest rates go up to 5.5% (I would say within the next 6 months) we should see some fun though when the nurses and policemen (and local government officers)can’t afford their mortgage repayments.