Colektivo was just announced (StartupNorth, Hacker News), a new P2P financing site for small and medium sized enterprises.

I’d like to be excited about it but I smell a rat. Maybe it’s the arthritis making me cantankerous, or vague similarities with Capazoo.

Here’s the deal: if you’re going to make outrageous claims you better be able to back them up. You can have a few days grace while your web site gets spiffed up. If you want months it’s probably so you can rope in rich chumps.

Colektivo promises “more stable and better returns than mutual funds” to lenders and better interest rates for borrowers. I’d like to know what typical interest and default rates are in their financial universe. And what regulators will approve that kind of language on an investment vehicle brochure?

I love peer-to-peer finance, having lent through kiva and consulted for CommunityLend. For this model to succeed we need transparency and accountability.

I hope my gut feeling is wrong on this one, and I invite anyone from Colektivo to provide information that would reassure skeptics that these grandiose claims are legit.

Our single most urgent task today is to imagine a future after oil. A future without cars.

zelaurent is rightfully outraged that Canada is spending $4 billion to bail out car manufacturers. He accurately points out that the financial crisis is being used as a political expedient.

So let’s point out the obvious which politicians will never do: we’ve built a deadly machine.

There were 2,778 deaths due to motor vehicle traffic collisions in the year 2001 - a rate of 8.9 deaths per 100,000 population.1,2  In 2000-2001 there were 24,403 hospital admissions for traffic-related injuries, corresponding to a rate of 79 hospitalizations per 100,000 population. (tc)

We deal with the issue by campaigns against drunk driving, forcing drivers to use a seatbelt and extolling the virtues of air bags.

How about planning cities so we could walk every where? Fast and convenient transit options between cities?

Besides the deadly toll excised by collisions many people suffer premature death or lifelong respiratory diseases. Consider simply the cost to our health care system:

A recent study examined the economic value of reducing the health effects of air pollution by introducing cleaner vehicles and fuels in Canada.  This study found that the economic value of avoiding these health effects was $24 billion over a period of 24 years,  compared to a cost of $6 billion to implement the program. (hc)

This bailout is just the most recent contribution everyone is making to keeping these old industries alive. We’re paying in lives lost and shortness of breath.

Even those costs will seem small compared to the effects of climate change. The scale of the issue is vast and frightening: runaway climate change could kill hundreds of millions of our fellow humans.

It may be possible to eliminate 90% of our emissions by 2050 while still keeping cars around. Some prototypes already get 300 miles per gallon. If we continue bailing out car manufacturers, if we continue enabling their vision, will they ever build comparable machines?

For now most of the moral debate rests upon what will happen to workers.

Many people will be out of jobs. We as a society need to help people reconvert. Expect a fight: unions want to protect their nearly $34 an hour.

My grandfather was a barber, one of the last to shave customers. My father was in the last generation that received an SOS by Morse code. Not too long ago 98% of workers were agricultural. I don’t know anyone who is a tinker or a blacksmith. Very few people fish whales for oil.

Occupations change and economies evolve. We can ease the transition for affected workers if our politicians can see that the car era must come to a close. Throwing more money at the problem or extracting more empty promises of fuel efficiency from manufacturers is merely a delaying tactic.

Our financial crisis was built on the assumption that we could grow our economy safely and indefinitely, ignoring natural limits. Companies padded their balance sheets by externalizing monstrous and ballooning costs.

Let’s not quibble about a few more billion dollars. Let’s ignore the inflated job figures for people we can help reconvert.

It’s time our politicians showed real vision. We need a future where we breathe easier and climate changed is checked. A future where ecological destruction is not counted as a positive because GDP goes up. If they can’t provide that, they have no business calling themselves ‘leaders’.

I’ve already accused them of showing contempt for democracy when they would have refused May a place in the leaders debate. Now Conservatives would have us believe that a coalition government would not have democratic legitimacy.A quick look at the election results shows the Liberals and NDP got over 44% of the popular vote while the Conservatives got under 38%.

The Bloc adds 10% of the popular vote.

We do not need to go to the polls again; Canadians have spoken and we didn’t want to give Harper a majority. The Governor General should use her power to avoid another election.

I have concerns that the Liberal-NDP coalition will be spending money bailing out auto-makers instead of making public transit and green jobs their priority. I do not believe this will be a great government.

There should be no doubt however that they are much better than the Conservatives and have a clear right to form government.

About a month ago, STM and Google announced the launch of Google Transit for Montreal. Both bloggers (Patrick Tanguay, Fagstein, Daniel Lemire, Roberto Rocha, Tristan Péloquin), and mainstream news sites covered the event.

I want the same data that was given to Google, so I can create isochrone or “travel-time” maps. So far I’ve put in two days of work on the imaginatively named isochrones project. It’s open-source and accessible on github. It was all written pair-programming, first with William Lachance, then with François Beausoleil.

It took the STM a few days to answer my call, and when they did I was informed it was “impossible” at this time for them to share the data. Release of said data would be considered in the medium-term, but my caller wouldn’t say how long the medium-term is. Incredibly helpful.

My options are apparently to write a partnership proposal or go to their monthly administration meeting

If you have the patience to fight a bureaucracy, you have my admiration. I no longer have the stomach for it: all I want to do is write code.

It was originally a snippet to do a tag cloud, but I needed to show places on a map. weigh_by_relative_importance now lives as a gist.

Like Semantic Menu, it was developed while working for Bloom Digital, which continues to encourage me to release as open source whatever generic work I do for them.

They are still looking for a junior to intermediate developer; a good opportunity for someone wanting to tackle hard problems with cutting edge technologies.

Everyone is watching the US election.

Fraud could be the real story. Many states -including some swing states- have extremely hackable voting systems. An unclear result could have dire consequences for the US.

I wish more non-US citizens would have the decency not to take sides. Wouldn’t you be annoyed if an American had the chutzpah to tell you who to vote for? I might vote for someone else just to spite them. We have to trust they will make an informed decision; it is what democracy is all about. US readers: please do go and vote.

The pollsters are more wrong than usual. Most pollsters are under-sampling youth vote as well as underestimating their likely turnout and skew for Obama.

Many impacts of this election campaign will be non-obvious. Recently bookmarked in politics, a story about Obama’s organization. It will serve as a template and inspiration to political organizers the world over. If that network stays active in the US, there’s no saying what can happen.

Republicans will self-destruct, but how? The odd alliance of neo-cons and religious fundamentalists is unraveling, and tonight looks like their coup de grâce. While the real conservative might come back and oust the neo-cons, the fundamentalists are more unpredictable. All I know is there will be gnashing of teeth, frothing at the mouth and more gay pastors being outed.

After Rails Rumble I decided I wanted  to code a plugin to make large menus easier to write. If this interests you, please check Semantic Menu on github.

There is 1 todo left: a default style sheet. That is not something I can do easily, so if you use this project and end up creating CSS for a menu, please share

James and I went to visit Cafe Myriade (praized page) for their Grand Opening. He grabbed this shot after a friendly latte art challenge:

Myriade is worth visiting if you care about either coffee or chocolate. Baristas Anthony Benda and Scott Rao are both obsessive about coffee: Anthony is a competitive barista and Scott is the author of The Professional Barista’s Handbook.

Seeing them at work refining techniques and recipes is amazing and inspiring; they had received a new type of coffee maker akin to a french press and were testing different quantities and steep times.

For chocolate fanatics this is the only retail spot I know of in Montreal that carries SOMA chocolate, including their hot chocolate. SOMA is one of only 2 chocolatiers in Canada that make their own chocolate; I religiously visit them every time I’m in Toronto.

One of Anthony’s signature drinks is a coffee with melted chocolate. For his last competition he tried over a dozen different chocolates to find the perfect fit. Rather than being satisfied with his choice, it only seems to have ignited another obsession.

Cafe Myriade is located at 1432 Mackay, close to Maisonneuve at Guy-Concordia.

Our Rails Rumble app is live. Check out our screencast.

If you use Rails, install the plugin:

Rails:
script/plugin install git://github.com/giraffesoft/what_does_this_error_mean-rails

Merbivores:
sudo gem install what_does_this_error_mean-merb

An app, 2 plugins and a screencast. We haven’t finished all the features we wanted, but that’s not too shabby.

Now make sure you vote for us

We’re been preparing for Rails Rumble for months, a competition where we have 48 hours to create and launch a web application. 2 full days to go from an idea to its implementation, at which point people can vote for us

Francois has a training video you must see to appreciate the grueling preparations we undertook.

Along with James and Mathieu, we’re team Giraffesoft. The project is called What does this error mean .com, and will be up soon.

The competition rules are such that we can make use of code we open sourced, which will include blank. And while we brainstormed the idea and feature set (also allowable), we have not written a single line of code for this project. With Francois and James on the same team, I don’t think that will be a problem!

Good luck to all other Rumble participants.