Double Blind

Raven has been keeping track of the politics behind the obscure International Boundary Commission (IBC) with excellent coverage of the firing of Dennis Schornack, previous US commissioner of the IBC. It is well worth searching his weblog for the articles and reading up on this very interesting story.

My contribution will be pictures of the property in question that got Schornack fired. The property is on the Blane, WA side of the border, owned by Herbert and Shirley-Ann Leu. They built a wall on the north side of their property (facing Canada) and it was within the 20 foot “vista” that is in the jurisdiction of the International Boundary Commission. Note that no treaty signed with the USA and Canada dictates that the “vista” be created, it appears to be a regulation that both sides agreed to. Just north of the border is 0 Ave (a road which I have written on before). You can view the property on Google Maps, or have a better aerial view (before the house was built) as follows:

Finally, since I travel along 0 Ave quite frequently I stopped by the place and took some pictures. Please note these pictures are large and were taken in early August.

The first picture was from the 184 St and 0 Ave intersection, facing southwest:

Here are three pictures of the wall in question, going from east to west. You can see on the west picture that one of the property owners was working on the garden. I contemplated talking to her, but I thought against it.

Here is a picture of me standing on 0 Ave, facing southeast at the wall. Note the border marker on the left hand side of the picture, which demarcates the border. Also observe that the trench that constitutes the border is about 3 feet deep.

Finally, I jumped into the border trench and took pictures that were parallel to the border – one was facing east (toward the border monument) and west (facing away from the border monument). You can use these pictures to judge how close the distance to the wall was:

Some disclosure – so I don’t get arrested the next time I visit the USA, at no time was my whole body inside the USA. Nor did I notice any helicopters swoop down on me or anything of that nature. I have, however, noticed helicopters just barely on the US side of the border fly parallel to the border on other days, just not the day I took the pictures.

I’m plagiarizing my own comments from Langley Politics:

… By cutting the GST, Harper is essentially giving the middle finger to both the Fraser Institute and the Centre for Policy Alternatives, which is real leadership.

I’ll take a tax cut in any way I can. As everybody here and so-called “experts” will point out, it’s not the most rational way to deliver a tax cut, but $5 billion less each year in the federal government’s hands is fine by me.

The people that pay taxes should be the ones to benefit from the tax reductions. A GST cut is arguably the most egalitarian way of giving it out. This is why it’s upsetting so many people since they want their own special interest group to benefit from social engineering the income tax act.

Another confluence bites the dust! Tim Dinsdale did 51N124W in a multi-day venture with his brother. For some strange reason the Confluence.org organizers marked this as “incomplete” because they did not supply the minimum pictures (two pictures from the confluence point), but considering they snapped their GPS around the right area I would consider it a moral victory on their behalf.

The “incomplete” status of the confluence makes it tempting to go next year and fill in that blank, but Tim mentions that he will be submitting in the required photos, although they are blurry. He arrived at the confluence around 5:00pm, and the sunset at that date would have been 6:46pm.

I’m also curious whether the Ramose Creek – Edmond Creek convergence was as difficult to cross as I anticipated it would.

Update: If the link doesn’t give you the story yet, try again in a few days – it has to go through the submission process.

They paid $240 million for a miniscule 1.6% minority stake in Facebook. This values the entire firm at about $15 billion (this is assuming they could buy the other 98.4% at the rate they paid for the first 1.6%).

This is a great deal for Facebook – although it is not public how the deal was structured (i.e. how much actual control they relinquished or how many obligations they picked up as a result of this investment), they have managed to sell a small chunk of the business for an enormous amount.

I know how Facebook can best implement the money: money market funds are trading at 3.8% for short term cash and you can be sure that 3.8% (about $9 million income a year) will be infinitely more than whatever Facebook could spend $240 million doing. There is no core competency they can expand out of their currency niche.

If I was a shareholder of Microsoft, I would be selling as fast as I can – if management is stupid enough to spend your cash like they just did here, then you can be sure they’ll blow the other 30 billion they have in the bank in short order.

I am extremely skeptical that Facebook could possibly live up to a $15 billion valuation – there are a lot of companies out there that trade significantly under $15 billion that you could buy which have stable, inflation-adjusted cash flows. For example, you could buy CP Rail for $10.5 billion today. They made $707 million over the past 12 months, after taxes. Facebook won’t get this close, ever.

Let’s pretend you’re on a 6-lane road, with all six lanes clear (examples would be Granville Street and Oak Street). You’re driving up the middle lane and you see the bus stopped on the right hand lane picking up and dropping off passengers. When the bus is ready to leave, the driver signals left for a few flashes and goes straight in the right lane, without changing lanes.

This is something I’ve consistently observed bus drivers perform and I was always given the impression that if you blink left, you are indicating you either want to make a left turn or want to get into the left lane. When bus drivers blink left but really mean “I’m leaving the current spot and I’m taking off” I find this to be very annoying. Why do they continue to signal left when they don’t intend to switch lanes? It just makes the times when they really want to get into the left lane less apparent.

An 82 year old pilot, Peter Garrison, flew into a condo building in Richmond. Nobody was killed except for the pilot.

The worst political reaction to the following was said by Bill McNulty, councillor in Richmond:

Richmond City Councillor Bill McNulty thinks Friday’s plane crash into an apartment could have been avoided. He says pressure needs to be put on NAV Canada and Transport Canada to make sure small planes fly over Sturgeon Banks and not the city itself. (News 1130AM)

General aviation flight routes is not the problem here, somebody 82 years old flying is. It’s difficult enough for an 82 year old person to drive an automobile, let alone fly an airplane.

McNulty has always been the most “populist” councillor in Richmond, attempting to say things that he believes the public will want to hear. Unfortunately, playing that type of political game gets you elected, and the corresponding governance that the people receive is not surprising.

This post was inspired by my brother, who sent me a few emails with links that I have on the bottom of this post.

There are three ways of cheating that you really have to watch out for in online poker. I played quite a bit of this between 2003 and 2006 on a recreational basis and got out of the game since it was clear that I would have had to develop some software to start cheating in order to increase my profitability to the point where it would be worthwhile. The turning point was sometime in March or April of 2006 when my expected value on single table tournaments went from about 35 cents per dollar spent (this baseline was consistent from day one) to 8 cents per dollar spent. 8 cents per dollar is still profitable, but not nearly as much as it had been and I highly suspected something was wrong. I’ve cashed out every penny from my account and haven’t touched it since.

The mildest way of cheating is somebody using a computer program to make assisted decisions concerning odds, or in the case of Stud Poker, memorizing all the cards and being able to recompute proper odds in real-time. Although this person has no additional access to information, he has the ability to process it faster and more efficiently. I suspect the way I was cheated above was through this method – normally you get 3 or 4 morons in a single table tournament, but when that goes down to one or two, it seriously impacts your ability to finish in the top three (which is where the money is).

A more extreme version of cheating is when people have multiple accounts and they play on the same table, sharing information about their cards with other and colluding to extract the most amount of money from the table. Although they have an advantage, it is not to the degree where they would be able to crush people in the short term, which makes this type of cheating difficult to detect from external observers. Over the long run such type of cheating would be highly profitable.

Finally, the most blatant way of cheating is when you can see everybody’s hole cards since you’ve got privileged access to the system. This takes no effort at all to recover funds from people and the highest effort you have to put in is making sure that you’re not too obvious about it.

There was a case recently dealing with Absolute Poker where some person won a tournament under very suspicious circumstances. ABC News has an article about it and also the 2+2 poker forum (as well as every poker and online gambling-related internet forum).

Anybody with money in a poker account online should be playing strictly for recreational purposes for dollars, and not tens of dollars since you’re most likely getting cheated. Personally, I have switched to prediction markets as a mode of online entertainment, as the markets in question are much more difficult to cheat in.

Paying 10 bucks to see spam is quite annoying. Normally you can time your entrance about 10 minutes after the start time to reduce this, but then it’s a pain in the ass to find a good seat if you’re going to a movie that is remotely popular.

This is probably another reason why bittorrent and home movie systems have surged in popularity – you don’t have to deal with idiots that didn’t shut off their cell phones, you don’t have to deal with commercials, you can make real food while watching a movie, etc. I’m surprised the movie theatre business has stayed solvent as long as it has.

Note (added September 10, 2010): I will be closing comments on this thread at the end of September. I no longer wish to spend time pruning comments. Thank you.

Prefacing note (added August 2009): This was posted in October 2007 as my own personal reaction to the entrance exam and the people that come to this site have added in an unprecedented amount of comments. I intend to keep the comments open as long as people post useful information. I will prune useless content. Posting messages such as “I passed!” or something that could not possibly help others will be deleted. Please note your identity will not be revealed unless if you choose to reveal it in your comments. When replying to other people’s comments, please use the date and time they posted the comment.

Note (added November 26, 2009): I have removed 223 comments that are irrelevant. Specifically, comments that did not relate to the entrance exam, and comments relating to “When will I get my marks?” and similar comments have been removed.

I just wrote the CMA Entrance exam. It consisted of 105 multiple choice questions over four hours. The test examines the content you would see roughly 6 courses of university (two for intermediate financial accounting, two for intermediate managerial accounting, one introductory finance and one introductory taxation).

The passing grade is 60%. My probability matrix when leaving the exam went something like this:

Score of less than 60%: 1%
60% to 69%: 25%
70% to 79%: 55%
80% to 89%: 15%
90% to 100%: 4%

(Subsequent Note: I eventually got 85%, deciles for MA/FA/Fin/Tax was 1st/2nd/2nd/6th, respectively).

The test was less difficult than I initially suspected (some of the core topics which I had expected killer questions were not asked), but the questions (especially in the managerial accounting portion) were extremely lengthy and I used 3 hours and 58 minutes to go through the “first pass” of answering all the questions.

I thought some of the questions had very tricky ways to solve them – they certainly added extra information that if you used it, would lead to an incorrect answer. One of my favourite trick questions dealt with the difference between permanent and temporary differences in terms of income tax expenses. The question gave you a piece of information that would have lead to a temporary difference, while one piece of information was a permanent difference. You had to disregard the temporary difference to answer the question correctly. Of course the multiple choice answers included both treatments of the temporary difference (subtracting and adding).

The room that I was in seated 88 students and only one person handed in their test early (about 45 minutes early and he looked rather disgruntled when doing so). After the exam, other people indicated they had difficulty managing to give each question a full amount of effort so it was clear that this test was time constrained. I don’t think the average grade will be too high on this examination.

(Subsequent note: You may find the CMA SLP thread to be useful, and the CMA Board Report review.)

This is a response to Paul Hillsdon’s post about Dropping the Ball on the Pavement.

It’s important to distinguish between freeways (e.g. Highway 1/91/99) and highways (Highway 7/10/15 and Highway 99 in Vancouver). Some highways are no more than glorified roads.

The 1960′s plan called for many more freeways than we got since that stopped in the early 1970′s – the only part that was built was the Georgia street viaduct (going around BC/GM place) in downtown Vancouver.

Note that the original plan had no mention of an “East-west connector” (Highway 91).

Industrial areas are good around freeways since industrial land owners don’t care about noise and the proximity is good for commuting workers. For residents, the ideal placement is outside of earshot of the freeway, but close enough to be able to get onto an interchange. Freeways help to improve land value by increasing its connectivity to other areas. Once the new Port Mann Bridge is built, land south of the Fraser will continue to get more valuable as it will be much more accessible than present.

The 200 St interchange and Highway 1 has a ton of room (the roads are purposefully wide to make sure that queueing traffic does not stay on the freeway) and while you could plant trees in that area, Langley council has decided to put industrial zoning. While it is more aesthetically pleasing to put up nature, the land is valuable and has been dedicated to a more functional purpose.

One of the purposes of the gateway project is to help alleviate pressure on the Alex Fraser Bridge by getting a freeway connected from Highway 99 to Highway 1 (the South Fraser Perimeter Road). This will help alleviate pressure on 176 Street (Highway 15) and the Alex Fraser / Queensborough bridge as a result. It will also necessitate an expansion of Highway 99.

What the hell is wrong with the Provincial Liberals? Do they not read up on their history?

They seem to be sticking fairly close to the plan. The only thing they can be accused of is not moving quickly enough.

The last major road expansion in the Lower Mainland was when Highway 91 (including the Alex Fraser Bridge) was completed and this was a product of the Bill Bennett government, completed in Bill Van der Zalm’s reign. The NDP in the 1990′s approved the awesome Island Highway (Highway 19, my nickname for it is the “Glen Clark Speedway”) built, added a lane on the Port Mann and did the paint job on the Lion’s Gate Bridge.

So far, the BC Liberals have to their credit some interchange improvements (the big one being Highway 91A, smaller ones along Highway 1, e.g. 200St, Mt. Lehman Road, Vedder Rd), and some roadwork expansion (Highways 5C, 10, 15). Eventually the Golden Ears Bridge will be built, the Port Mann twinned, Highway 1 expanded and hopefully the South Fraser Perimeter Road will get done.

Now my question is: When the heck are they going to finish the 72 St and Highway 91 interchange? The 20 million price tag will pay for itself in a year. It was supposed to have been built by the end of 2007 as part of the Border Infrastructure Program but it fell through. Why?