Wow, I'll let others worry more about the "one laptop per terrorist supporter" issues and say, WTF? They city's spending almost $11,000,000 / year to give computers and high-speed Internet to 3000 families? That's about $3500 / family! Who are they buying these things from, Dash Domi? Why not just give half to the schools and half to the local libraries to put computers for everyone?

Now, this sounds more like a "social justice" program -- i.e. Bucks for Buzz and his Boys -- than it does a meaningful attempt to help anyone, but I've got a better deal for the city and the disadvantaged: outsource it to me and I'll save the city lots of money and double the number of disadvantaged kids getting computers.

• For $22.95 / month I can get Rogers Ultralight Internet.
• For $450 I can get Dell Inspiron 531 with plenty of everything and a 17" LCD Monitor

The logistics are fairly simple. Dell will ship directly to their apartment and I'll handle the Rogers billing from here. I'll assume I can get Rogers and Dell to eat GST & PST given the size of the order we're making, plus the potential for a tax write off for everyone. Rogers and Dell will also handle tech support directly, which is a reasonable part of becoming computer literate. The city will provide the names and addresses who to ship to. I'll need 5 people at say $50,000 / each to handle paperwork and logistics. One person will be dedicated to Googling names to weed out friends-of-terrorists. Let's also posit that I'll maintain another 6000 Internet accounts for people who have already got their computers.

So here's the budget:

• Internet connection: $1.65 million (6000 @ 22.95/month * 12 months)
• Legacy internet: $1.65 million (6000 @ 22.95/month * 12 months)
• Computers: $2.7 million (6000 @ $450 / each)
• Employees: $250,000 (5 @ $50,000)
• Offices: $150,000
  
• Subtotal: $6.4 million
• Management fee: 1.28 million (20%)
  
• Grand total: $7.68 million
• Savings to City of Toronto: $3.08 million

That'll buy Dave Miller a lot of food carts. I'm available on my cell during normal working hours.

David Miller's right hand transit boy Adam Giambrone is threatening to smash up his trains and go home because the ungrateful slobs in Toronto don't know what's good for them, quit their whinging and take their tax medicine. The source of all this angst and teeth gnashing is something to do with a 350 million some-odd dollar "shortfall" in the latest and greatest 7.8 billion budget, which the clever kids at city hall were going make up a series of taxes and fees aimed at maximizing the pain on non-Mayor Quimby voters.

Why does Toronto need a 7.8 billion dollar budget, given that city basically stopped growing in the last decade? God only knows -- here's a little Excel chart I whipped up showing the Toronto operating budgets, constant dollar adjustments (assuming 2% inflation) and a per-pop breakdown where I could do it:

Since amalgamation, our budget has gone up a billion and change with no substantial population growth.

BTW, Mike Harris has been gone from power since 2002, so you can stop blaming him for downloading. It's been implicitly endorsed by his successors, neither named Mike or Harris.

Sources:

• Toronto Budgets
• Toronto population information, noting Toronto's anemic growth

Update -- here's everything you need to know about how to run a city the progressive way:

This is me at the Horseshoe talking on Agent X's phone to Tony Pierce about BlogMatrix, Nirvana, Matt Welch, and Ken Layne while having my photo taken by Raymi, whom I introduced myself to a few minutes earlier, just because it seemed like the thing to do.

TransitCamp on Sunday was very interesting. Here's a video from CityTV that gives a pretty good overview of what was going on (that's me standing up, red scarf, trench coated at :17 in):

[[player=http://www.youtube.com/share?v=PDkEPvIwarI]]

I attended two sessions and did the usual networking thing. The first session was about data as in opening up the transit schedules and providing real time locations of all buses and subways along the routes. You can read the session notes here. My impression? There's lots of good ideas. Kieran (who's net identity I haven't figured out yet) is working on a open collaborative data system for mapping the TTC and its routes. I'd prefer that the TTC and the city open up all its data information but I realize that this is going to require change mandated from the top down. This is something I've been b*tching about for years, and not only as an abstract sort of thing, but because I've been personally burned by it and that I think it makes Canada less competitive than the US. The TTC people in attendance didn't really say a lot. I wonder if they were scared by the presence of TTC Chair Adam Giambrone? In either case, they all gave the impression (to me, anyway) that that the TTC is very bureaucratic and not too fond of change.

In the afternoon I attended TTC + other modes of transit which covered many of the same issues. With an open way of sharing data, the TTC data could easily be integrated with Go, AutoShare^*, ZipCar^*, Greyhound and so on and so on. To address a particular concern about "not everyone has a computer" -- think 10 years out: with ubiquitous wifi and displays as cheap as singing birthday cards, we'll be living in a different future sooner than you think.

Other people writing about TransitCamp:

• Mark
• Will Pate
• Joey
• Julia Brechenreid
• David Crow

^* Notice how I'm linking to sponsors.

I'll be attending TransitCamp this morning to discuss APIs, Mashups and Microformats and to provide at least a little "from the right" perspective to what's going on:

An ad-hoc gathering at the Gladstone Hotel of designers, transit geeks, bloggers, visual artists, tech geeks and cultural creators passionate about transit in Toronto and the TTC. It is a platform for Toronto's talented design community and enthusiastic transit users and fans to demonstrate their creativity and contribute to a better way for Toronto's transit system. The content and ideas generated in this open unconference will be delivered to the TTC for their consideration in their work.

Watch the Penn & Teller Video.

I've posted a brief review and comments last night about Enterprise 2.0 Camp 2 over on my technical blog.

Toronto is not going to get the 2015 World Expo:

Toronto's bid for the 2015 World Expo is dead.

Mayor David Miller said early Thursday afternoon that Toronto will not be submitting a bid for the six-month world's fair.

"It slipped through the premier's fingers," said Coun. Brian Ashton. "There's no doubt in my mind that in the months to come what he will suddenly realize what he lost."

Note the weasel-like shifting of blame to someone else. Even the Greatest Mayor in the History of the Universe^® (i.e. Toronto) gets in on the act:

Miller had declared the bid dead once before — last Tuesday — when he pointedly blamed both governments.

Cities are about competently delivering core services, not about mega-project ribbon cutting.

CBC reports:

What was supposed to be smooth sailing for a new Toronto ferry's maiden voyage turned into a turbulent trip for those on board.

Shortly after leaving the mainland docks Wednesday, the ferry spun around in the harbour several times before smashing into the shore's breakwall after the captain had an anxiety attack.

Officials say blue smoke set off as part of a fireworks display meant to celebrate the voyage apparently obscured the view of the dock.

That caused the captain to panic and lose control of the vessel, said the Toronto Port Authority's head of operations, Ken Lundy.

The mishap turned what was supposed to be a 90-second crossing of the gap between the mainland and Toronto Island into a 30-minute journey. The gap is 120 metres wide.