Double Blind

The Throne speech can be found here and there are quite a few items that will create headlines. The two major items include the action on global warming and the reformation of local school boards. I will talk about global warming on this post.

The government pledges to reduce greenhouse emissions by 33% from present levels, or 10% below 1990 levels by 2020. This is an interesting response to the NDP’s calls to freeze emissions at 2007 levels – I wonder if this target was set to completely preempt the opposition on this issue. There will always be questions of feasibility – when you look at the 1990 to 2004 chart of BC greenhouse gas emissions, what the government is proposing is a huge cut.

In particular, if you look at the last year of data (2004), we have 66,800 kT of CO2 equivalent. The throne speech mentions that it wishes to go 10% below 1990 levels, which would involve going down to 46,350 kT. The decrease from 2007 levels are likely larger. But assuming the 2004 year, that leaves about 20,450 kT of emissions to reduce.

Where is this coming from? Assuming you take out every car and pick-up truck on the road, you’re about half way there. Of course, something like this won’t be happening, but this is the magnitude of the task at hand.

BC has always been blessed with hydroelectric power, which is why our electricity generation emissions are so low. However, due to the development of the natural gas industry in the northeast, emissions have increased significantly there. Chances are our fossil fuel industry will be faced with increased costs in the future – less marginal sites will not be drilled and as a result, we’ll likely receive less royalties in the future. The same goes with our manufacturing industry – increased costs will likely make us less competitive. Chances are we will end up importing products that we would have otherwise produced domestically.

One area of low lying fruit involves solid waste disposal – about 8% of our emissions result from the methane emissions of landfills. One proposal in the throne speech is to capture these emissions, although I don’t know how commercially viable this will be. I know that this will likely mean increased costs for waste disposal. The opportunities here are rather obvious – if you can develop a good system of recycling practically anything, that solid waste doesn’t have to reach the landfill.

I know one target for the government to reduce light vehicle emissions are hybrid vehicles. While these vehicles are more expensive than their gas-only counterparts, they are more efficient per litre of gasoline. This will bring up an interesting issue if more hybrid vehicles are on the road: will battery disposal become a significant issue? Will mass production of hybrid vehicles cause a strain on the supplies of lithium? I think these issues will be resolved in the future as hybrid vehicles become more commonly adopted. Still, when I run the numbers, it will be expensive to buy a hybrid vehicle.

You might note a common theme in all of these global warming initiatives – the cost of doing everything rises. It will cost more to do the things we do today. Higher costs means we are less competitive, in exchange for reduced greenhouse gas emissions (the benefits of which can’t be measured). This is a trade-off our provincial government has just made for us.

I have one more follow-up to my previous article on basic math teaching.

I’m taking a large accounting course that goes on throughout the summer. One of the recommendations that they have is buying a financial calculator in order to calculate the present value and future value of various sums and annuities. There are tables on the back of the textbooks, but in an examination situation we won’t have the luxury of using them.

However, the formula for calculating the net present value of a future cash flow is very easy – divide it by 1 plus the interest rate, to the power of n years. The formula for calculating the present value of an annuity sum are a little more complicated, but they can still be easily remembered. You don’t need a financial calculator to do all the calculations – they’re all given to you in formulas.

I don’t intend to buy a financial calculator since I can effectively do it in my head. Is this distrust of ‘black box processors’ a good or bad thing? I know when I look at my classmates when they fiddle with their financial calculators that some of them don’t have a lot of trust in it, but still choose to deal with it anyway.

Fortunately, my HP42S model calculator (I consider this one the best HP calculcator, ever) is explicitly not on the banned calculator list so I am totally in business.

Followers of BC Politics should know that the provincial trash talk season will begin shortly with the opening of the Legislature on Tuesday. I’ve been meaning to go to Victoria to attend the pomp and ceremony, but an evening commitment in Vancouver means I won’t be able to make it – hopefully next year my schedule will work better. The next BC Budget speech will be on February 20, and unfortunately I face the same time constraint – why don’t they make these things on Mondays?

The provincial NDP appear to be learning that their primary function in opposition is to be stirring up as much excrement as possible and not acting at all in a co-operative fashion. It should be interesting to see what they can come up with in the coming weeks. Being a couple years away from the next election, it isn’t quite time for them to go completely hostile, but the internal pressure is that Carole James needs to keep her job, and the only way that she can keep her job is if the BC Liberals start slipping in the polls. That hasn’t been happening. The traditional wedge issues haven’t been favourable to the NDP either (yet). Typically where governments get in trouble with multiple terms in power is through corruption and abuse of power and there hasn’t been any signs of wholesale abuse in this department.

In the throne speech, the news has been reporting that the Premier will be announcing a California-style plan in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Gordon Campbell himself mentioned that there may need to be mandatory targets legislated toward industry. I don’t doubt there will be something announced in the throne speech, but the question is what will be the substance – legislating the use of all automobiles and trucks as illegal would get us about 40% to meeting our Kyoto Protocol obligations.

As readers may know, I am not a believer that we should be in the business of trying to change our climate and that any resources spent toward this could be better spent elsewhere. I’d be much more happier if resources were applied to continuously improving the quality of our water infrastructure, both in the delivery and the treatment. I’d also be much happier if resources that were earmarked toward “global warming” be directed toward the processing of solid waste and junk in general – I know the government has an initiative to processing electronic junk in an environmentally sensitive fashion. Aircare (enacted with the NDP) has also been relatively successful – despite all the complaining when you take your car in and pay the cash, I think the program works well. There’s so much lower hanging fruit that can be tackled environmentally that will have tangible results compared to spending money in a futile attempt to change the weather.

Vancouver Wild is a coffee table book of very scenic pictures of both the urban and scenic landscapes of the coast mountain. Very picturesque and worth flipping through the pages at the library.

Previous story.

The blog might still be down, but thanks to (you know who you are:)), has provided a google cache link. Click here for the story.

This has been two stories over the past week where I have posted dead links. Because my creative instincts have been coming in bursts, what I’ve been ending up doing is writing a whole bunch of articles at once and then auto-timing them to show up here at 11:00pm daily. Some are small, and some are large. I try to put the more time sensitive ones up front, but sometimes the internet just doesn’t co-operate with me when people decide to pull the links on their own articles!

An interesting YouTube video titled Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth. You’ll go through childhood memories of how to multiply in two digits and how to divide.

What I find interesting is that apparently in modern education they are teaching alternative methods to multiplying and dividing numbers in the hopes that more children will be able to comprehend math. I can easily see the rationale behind this: If a student is having trouble the traditional way, maybe if we show them a different way how to multiply then they might get it.

The only problem is that this line of thinking is absolutely incorrect. The only reason why the “standard algorithm” is used is because it is the most efficient and least error-prone method compared to all others. This is why it has stood the test of time. By introducing these other algorithms, it does nothing but confuse the situation. It’s like trying to teach people four different languages in kindergarten – the corresponding result will be somebody that doesn’t speak at all effectively. It’s not like in Computer Science where you learn sorting algorithms and pick the best one for the situation – when it comes to multiplying figures on paper, there really only is one way to do it.

The other issue is dependence on calculators – if you don’t have a good grounding in being able to perform multiplication lightning fast with numbers from 1 to 10, then you’ll have trouble doing any sort of pen and paper exercise. A lot of students would make the claim that using calculators saves them time and they don’t have to know multiplication tables, but where that line of thinking really catches up to you is when you replace arithmetic with algebra and it goes downhill from there.

The real reason why calculators are preferred is that it allows one to become mentally lazy. It’s much easier to hit buttons instead of mentally parsing it together.

It will be interesting to see the sociological effects of dependence on calculators and spell checking – my initial guess is that spell checking will have little effect (other than the creation of a new language that I will dub “myspaceish”). The dependence on calculators, however, will likely benefit those that can actually do math the “hard way”.

On a similar note is the following scam to watch out for. It helps if you’re being scammed by a former playboy model, but it’s always important to count your change. You can only do that if you can add in your head without a calculator!

This post is highly amusing.

I know there are enough of these creatures roaming around the city that one wonders if their goal is to take over by reproducing enough and then one day mass-attacking humans.

It reminds me of one day when I went into a downtown Vancouver pizza joint and I saw a pigeon pecking away at the floor, inside the building. That was amusing, but it also reminds me that urban life not only changes the people that live inside it, but also the animals!

Updated link.

This has to be the most value-free contribution I’ve seen to the internet that actually makes some money for people with highly creative imaginations on how to harvest clicks.

It also goes to show that Google’s ad revenues are only as valuable as the confidence of the people purchasing such ads. Eventually the market for text ads will drop as purchasers of advertising realize that such methods are increasingly ineffective.

Still, as long as people are willing to buy advertising, there’s a market for it.

Look no further than this weblog, which made over $10 in ad revenues for the month of January, despite the fact that I know most (if not all) of the regular readers here don’t click on text ads. It makes me highly suspicious that the only source of revenue for this site (which I’m only keeping tabs on for amusement purposes and not to generate any sort of economic wealth) is generated through fraudulent clicking. There is a serious agency problem in play. Google doesn’t care – they make the bulk of revenues. I don’t care – I get free money. The people that should care are the advertisers that actually pay into these scheme and they get the short end of the stick since Google or myself doesn’t care whether they get genuine customers delivered to them.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find the internet advertisement market collapse over the next few years once everybody clues in that 90% of the market is just one huge scam by click fraud artists.

I’ll just pass along this link from Richard: How to lose your shirt in China (update: Previous link at Macleans no longer functional; I have replaced it with a message board post that has posted the entire article).

I’ve learned a lot about Chinese culture (in China) by reading about how others experience it. It’s ruthlessly capitalistic – just imagine the concept of rules and structure being thrown out of the way to support the people that have the most amount of leverage over you. It doesn’t surprise me in the least to find out that most people that have significant infrastructure down there lose it for whatever reason, usually corruption and backstabbing. It takes a certain type of attitude to survive down there – it’s shark eat shark. And if you’re a minnow, good luck – you don’t stand a chance.

This is why I will not invest a single penny of my capital in that country, or any company that has too much exposure to that region – there’s too much risk from corruption.

A good trick Canada should learn is to get a whole bunch of Chinese investors to buy up our assets, and then suddenly play the “expropriation” card. This is the winning move in terms of game theory – when playing the prisoner’s dilemma, if your opponent always snitches on you, you snitch on them until they shut up.

A couple months ago I received 5 shares of Idearc, which was a distribution from my share of Verizon “can’t tell the difference between cents and dollars” Communications. I had expressed my trouble of getting rid of these shares in a low cost fashion. There had been a mini-tender offer which never was sent to me, so I was still hanging onto these shares.

Today I received a letter in the mail from Idearc itself. I won’t bother quoting the entire thing here, but essentially it boils down to the following: If you have less than 100 shares and want to sell them, you can. You will pay a $1.25/share processing fee, and will received the weighted average price of all Idearc common shares sold in the open market through the transfer agent.

Since I have five shares, this represents a $7.50 commission. Compared to the $29 that I would have otherwise paid to do the same thing, I accepted the offer.

The only problem is that I suffer from a bit of market risk between now and February 23, which will be the week of transactions. Companies no longer do their bulk transactions on a single day to reduce execution risk. But even if the stock tanks 10% between now and then, it won’t be too much of a hit and still would represent a better price than if I did the transaction myself. Also in theory, I could have waited a week or two to accept the offer but I just wanted to get this out of the way.

The other interesting thing about the tender offer is that they also gave you the option of purchasing shares to increasing your holdings to 100 shares. This also would result in a $1.25 commission per share. There is no circumstance that anybody rational would choose to do this. In US markets, having shares in equal increments of 100 no longer makes a difference in terms of getting the best price – fifteen years ago it made a difference but today it doesn’t.

This sort of offer is only realistic for people that have 10 shares or less of Idearc. Fortunately, that includes me and this story ends well. Assuming the stock doesn’t go anywhere over the next month, I should be receiving about CAD$190 in proceeds which can be deployed in much better places than an excessively leveraged yellow pages company that will likely get wiped out by Google over the next decade.