Double Blind

A BC Mustel Poll, August 23, 2007 taken between August 8 to 20 indicates that the BC Liberals have 50% support in the province. Considering the incompetent performance up to date by the NDP, this is no surprise.

But what I find interesting is the dip in the NDP numbers and the corresponding increase in Green party numbers. Keep in mind that the Green party in BC has been operating without a leader (Adrienne Carr left to join Elizabeth May in the federal scene) and without a coherent media engine. Although it is difficult to infer too much weight into a single poll, it is clear that about 20 people of the 501 person random sample favoured the Green Party instead of the NDP. This is confirmed by looking at the leader approval ratings.

Whether this 501 person poll can be extrapolated to the population is another matter. However, if this trend continues, the NDP are in deep, deep trouble.

Here is a big prediction: If the NDP do not get rid of Carole James by 2009 AND if the Green party elects a leader that is “publicly presentable” (e.g. did not make their living with a career in protesting) then the Green party will win seats in the legislature in 2009. You heard it here first.

Carole James is finally on the public record on an issue: she’s against the Gateway program. Although twinning of the Port Mann bridge is the big ticket item, there is also the South Fraser Perimeter road (which will be the only freeway connecting Highway 99 to Highway 1) and the Pitt River Bridge expansion (the third most needed infrastructure enhancement in the Lower Mainland, behind the Port Mann Bridge and the George Massey Tunnel/Highway 99).

The political calculus says: What further support could she get? Are there any BC Liberal supporters remaining that are against the Gateway project? Why compromise the support base in Burnaby, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Maple Ridge and Surrey, the residents of which whom probably would most benefit from Gateway?

The only theory that makes sense is that she’s fighting the Green Party. This is assuming that it was a rational decision to begin with, rather than a knee-jerk reaction to being criticized for not taking a stand on anything until after the fact.

Walter, in his article You, and me and GHG, states:

According to BC’s Ministry of the Environment, transportation is the single largest source of green house gas in the province, accounting for 42% of the total emissions.

The 42% figure is implicitly referencing an 6-year old source of data. The latest inventory figures, which is for 2004, show a 40% total, or 27,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

We have the science and technology right now to reduce our green house gas emissions by up to 30%. How do we do it? By making smarter vehicle choices.

Unfortunately, it is not that easy. Let’s say you wanted to target 30% of the GHG budget. This is a reduction of 8,100 tonnes.

Out of the 27,000 tonnes, we have the following that are relatively “untouchable” for relatively obvious economic necessity arguments:
Domestic Aviation, 1,500 tonnes
Heavy-Duty gasoline/diesel vehicles, 5575 tonnes
Railways, 400 tonnes
Domestic Marine, 2,700 tonnes
Offroad, Pipelines and “Others”, 5,500 tonnes

This leaves about 11,500 tonnes, which consists mainly of light duty gasoline vehicles (5,130 tonnes) and trucks (5,790). We need to excise about 8,100 tonnes out of this. Even if you gave everybody in the province a hybrid vehicle, the most you could get that figure down to is 7,500 tonnes between the both of them, for a savings of about 13% of the transportation GHG budget.

This clearly cannot happen. The only way that you can achieve a 30% cut in the transportation GHG budget is by reducing obviously commercial forms of freight (heavy duty diesel vehicles) in conjunction with a reduction of actual trips by people and more efficient vehicles.

I can see a decrease of 10% of the transportation GHG budget happening with significant capital expenditures but 30% is just not going to happen, especially in light of BC’s increasing population and trade route activity.

Yes I know that hybrids currently make up less than one per cent of total new car market right now, but sales are growing exponentially. We can all do our part in reducing green house gas emissions by simply buying a more fuel efficient vehicle.

Let’s take an example, the Toyota Camry:

Toyota Camry Hybrid – $32,000 base model MSRP. Add GST/PST: $36,160. Subtract $1000 (federal) and $2000 (provincial) fuel efficiency / hybrid incentives. Total price $33,160. Consumption: 5.7L/100km or 50mpg (city or highway).

Camry LE – $25,900 base model MSRP. Add GST/PST: $29,267. Consumption: 9.5L/100km (30mpg) city, 6.5L/100km (46mpg) highway, 8.0L/100km (35mpg) combined.

Cost of gas is about $1/litre, so that’s still a differential of about 3900 litres of gas. This is enough to get you 68,000km on a hybrid or 49,000km on a standard model.

The economics are still not there in terms of a person buying a new vehicle – the pure gas engine is still the better option when you factor in cost of capital. The incentives, however, have made it a closer decision.

Of course, when looking at a hybrid vehicle vs. something like a Toyota Yaris, the comparison doesn’t even come close:

Yaris, automatic transmission, and we’ll throw in all the options and goodies (the “Enhanced convenience package”) for $18,720 MSRP. After GST/PST that’s $21,153. The car also qualifies for a $1,000 federal rebate due to being good on fuel economy so the purchase price is $20,153. Consumption: 7.0L/100km (40 mpg) city, 5.6L/100km (50 mpg) highway, 6.4L/100km (45mpg) combined.

This difference amounts to 13,000 litres of gasoline and nobody is going to drive their Yaris or Hybrid vehicle for the distance required to burn up that much fuel. If people were truly interested in being environmentally friendly with their car, they would pick a Yaris instead of a hybrid vehicle.

The economics of replacing an existing and functional vehicle are even worse – gas is nowhere near the price where it would be worth junking a functional car for fuel economy purposes.

Sorry Walter, but the best thing I can do for greenhouse gas emissions right now is to keep my existing (six cylinder) vehicle in good shape and keep driving it. Mind you, if I was given an incentive of 5 thousand bucks to get a smaller vehicle I would snap on that offer very quickly. But as a taxpayer, I wouldn’t want to be subsidizing such activity as I don’t think the cost-benefit analysis would make the expenditure a net positive.

I would vote against MMP. Ontario’s Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) proposal is worse than the existing First Past the Post (FPTP) system, which is worse than the single transferable vote (STV) system.

The primary reason is the party list mechanism – there will be certain people you can’t get rid of by voting them out. They will be ranked high on the party list.

The second reason is that the 3% popular vote is arbitrary. I realize that in other systems, such as in Germany, have a 5% threshold. Systems with arbitrary plugs tend to be inelegant and MMP is no exception. Fractured legislatures should be an advertised feature of MMP, not a drawback.

These two flaws do not exist with STV. One big misconception about STV is that it is a proportional system. It is not. It is much closer to a municipal council election in nature (where you get a ballot with 30 names and have to select 8 people from the bunch) and is much more individualized than either of the other systems.

STV is the best design, which is why it will not pass in BC’s next referendum in 2009. MMP, however, might have a chance. I do not have a good political pulse of what’s going on in Ontario so I will not venture a hard guess.

I made a sale transaction on EBay for a small product (the sale was for about $90). Since I know it will fetch higher prices, I display my selling location from the USA. When going to the border to ship the device, I had the general impression that anything under $200 can go through a very informal process (i.e. just get waived through the border). However, I was taken to secondary inspection and they assessed a $10.75 APHIS and Truck fee. This fee is levied to any vehicles selling anything to the US. I paid it and went on with mailing the package. I generally don’t regard complaining to be very fruitful unless you know what you’re talking about, so I was going to write them back.

I looked up these fees on the internet and the regulations could be interpreted that if you weren’t going down for commercial purposes that you didn’t have to pay the fee. So I wrote them a letter with the receipt and asked for my money back on the basis of what I found off of their site (cbp.gov). On the bottom of the letter, I left my e-mail and phone number.

Amazingly enough, they called a week after I mailed the letter. They explained that it doesn’t matter whether it was for personal or commercial use, for customs purposes any sale in the USA is considered for commercial purposes. I could avoid the fee by not taking my car across the border (this is practical in Point Roberts or Sumas).

Although I didn’t get my money back, I was impressed at the US Customs and Border Patrol for being prompt and answering the barrage of questions I had on the phone when they called.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, Microsoft is in talks to take a minority stake in Facebook:

Microsoft in recent weeks approached Facebook with proposals to invest in the startup that could value the fast-growing site at $10 billion or higher, said people familiar with the matter. If those talks bear fruit, Microsoft could purchase a stake of up to 5% in the closely held startup, at a cost in the range of $300 million to $500 million, the people said.

Now I remember writing earlier that Facebook turning down a $1.6 billion offer from Yahoo was nuts, but acquiring a minuscule stake in Facebook for hundreds of millions of dollars is even more so – if I were Facebook, I’d try to bank the deal as quickly as possible.

A 5% ownership stake is nothing in the grand scheme of things – they will not lose control of the company and Microsoft won’t even have significant influence over strategic matters. The only reason Google would ever want to be in on this negotiation is to make the bidding price so high that others would have to pay more for it.

There is more economic evidence here:

Facebook, which is used by more than 40 million people to set up their own personal Web pages, to communicate with each other and to share photos and videos, has emerged as the poster child for the latest Internet wave. The company expects this year to have a profit of $30 million on revenue of $150 million, according to people familiar with the matter.

And also…

One open question amid the courting of Facebook is whether the site, which adds more than 200,000 new users a day…

Let’s do the math. You have “40 million” people using the service, with “200,000 new users per day”. This means that in 4 years, every man, woman and child in Canada and the USA will use the service. That will scale up to $1.2 billion in revenues a year assuming current revenue rates apply to the future. You apply a Google-like 30% profit margin to that revenue base and you end up with a $360 million a year after-tax cash stream. For the sake of argument assume this $360 million occurs today until forever. Apply a discount rate of 10% and the cash stream is worth $3.6 billion in present terms.

There are multiple issues here. One is that the service will not scale to the entire population of the planet (which the numbers seemingly try to do). Two is that in order to monetize the traffic base you have to start spamming the crap out of your users. We know where that ends up.

If Microsoft is stupid enough to pay $400M for a 5% minority stake in the firm, its a clear sign that they have gone nuts and should be avoided as an investment as their managers are now destroying shareholder value. Of course they will try to rationalize the purchase as a “strategic diversification” or some gobbleygook, but inevitably Facebook will turn out to be another Pointcast or Friendster as speciality services start to nibble away at them (e.g. Orkut).

Finally, the third party that should be paying the closest attention to this transaction is Craigslist. I’ll leave it an exercise to the reader why this is the case.

I have noticed on Highway 1 they have put up a new type of road sign. This sign is present east of the Port Mann bridge and it repeats every 20 kilometers or so. It is a wide-body sign and it is divided into two sections – on the left it says “Passing / Travel Lane” and on the right it says “Travel Lane” and both sides having “up” arrows as if you didn’t know where traffic will be going. There is a horizontal black strip with white font on the bottom of the sign which says “Be courteous – Pass in the left lane” or something to that effect.

I have been searching the internet for an image of these signs (ICBC and the Ministry of Transportation) but I can’t find it.

I am guessing this sign is replacing the small rectangular “Slow traffic keep left” sign which nobody seems to follow. I don’t think the enhanced sign will help either.

I have been doing a lot of driving on our freeways as of late and I have noticed that for the most part, the drivers are pretty good once you get past 176th Street in Surrey. However, when you venture into the Vancouver-Burnaby-Coquitlam stretch, they are atrocious.

One reason I can think of is because driving on freeways (merging and changing lanes in dense conditions) is never tested when you get your license, so nobody trained for them. I don’t know if road tests have changed over the past 10 years, but the only place I was tested on busy city streets. Maybe graduated licensing changes this, but I can’t even find what is explicitly tested on a road test on ICBC’s website.

A significant fraction of people do not adhere to the simple rule of “If you are in the left lane and the person behind you is going faster, get out of the left lane”. There are some people that think because the speed limit is 100km/h and they are going 105km/h that they can stay in the left lane because they are “speeding”. The flow of traffic suffers as a result.

The other situation I find very annoying is when you are approaching an interchange and you see oncoming traffic that is about to merge in the freeway. You are in the left hand lane going about 10km/h faster than the right hand lane traffic. However, the person in the right hand lane sees the merging traffic and gets into the left hand lane, forcing you to use your brakes to slow down. This is the most annoying thing on the planet – I can understand how trying to let traffic merge in at speed is a mentally taxing exercise, but it is no excuse to get into the left hand lane.

The only exception I will make to the preceding paragraph is a truck in the right hand lane and a truck merging. Since trucks merging in cannot get up to speed, I make sure I either pass the truck in the right lane or slow down and let the truck get into the left lane while we both pass the truck that is merging in. I have seen many drivers stick parallel to trucks in these situations (or marginally going faster than the truck) and this is ultimately more dangerous for both parties. It’s these sorts of situations that traffic police should be concentrating on, not speeding.

I’ve just noticed the official party standings and the Conservatives have 126 seats and the NDP have 30 seats, for a total of 156. 155 seats are needed for a majority. This means that the NDP now have some sway again in Parliament as both parties can form a majority vote. It is unlikely as they are ideologically the most apart in Parliament but should be interesting to see if they will broker a deal or two.

At the end of the last general election, the Conservatives had 124 seats and the NDP had 29, for a total of 153. This made the NDP completely irrelevant as not getting together with the lone independent MP Andre Arthur could deliver a majority.

Remember, all terrorists will:

Of course, I think Star Simpson was pretty stupid as well. Airports have to be one of the most sanitized places in the USA. You can’t even try to solicit sex in their washroom stalls anymore.

Here is a map of the area of concern. If you have driven to the Port Mann bridge (going westbound) you discover that cars can get off the freeway at 160 Street, but cars can get onto Highway 1 at either 160 Street or 152 Street. Usually cars getting off of 160 Street leave room for the cars getting on through this interchange, but there is no such ‘escape valve’ for the cars getting on via 152.

A very minor quick fix would be to prohibit traffic from using the 152 Street on-ramp in peak traffic (i.e. 7am to 7pm Mon-Fri). This would force drivers to choose the 160 St interchange if they wish to get on the freeway. This would result in a much smoother ride from 160 Street westbound, at the expense of putting more traffic onto the streets of Surrey and pushing any congestion back between 160 and 176 Street. However, this traffic is being pushed to an area that is outside the Guildford mall confines which would be a desirable outcome. I also think due to the nature of the 160 Street interchange (i.e. traffic can both get off and on) that traffic would flow slightly more smoothly and be worth the downside of reduced accessibility to Highway 1.