Double Blind

Just a note that the $30 early bird registration for the 2008 Sun Run closes at the end of the month – after it will be $35.

I noticed that to access the Learn to Run 10k schedule on Sport Med BC has been put behind a stupid system where you have to register in order to access the information. In addition, once you get in, the way that they let you access the information is convoluted and is generally much more annoying than what they had previously. The people that did their site redesign should be fired since it is now utterly unusable.

So to save people a bunch of time, I put the information in a spreadsheet and then paced it out with a three-day-a-week schedule leading up to the April 20 Sun Run. I started training earlier in advance (started in the middle of December), but this schedule worked fairly well for me in 2006 and 2007.

Sun Run training schedule

To read the non-regular run schedules, “10r-1w-15r-1w-20r-1w-10r” would be translated as “Run 10 minutes, walk one minute, run 15 minutes, walk one minute, run 20 minutes, walk one minute, run 10 minutes”. The rest of it is quite intuitive. Note that there is a four day gap between the last training run and the Sun Run, so perhaps you might want to include a short 25 minute run or something so your muscles don’t atrophy. Optionally, just re-scheduling it so that the last two training days are three days apart will also do the trick.

One should have a pretty good idea in March (specifically after the March 17 run) whether you’ll be able to do 10km better or worse than an hour. My last time was 57 minutes and 8 seconds, and my goal is to beat this time. In order to do this I need to be able to run faster than 10.6km/h continuously for 57 minutes. In practice this never happens – I really need to be running 11.5km/h for about 48 minutes and walk at 6km/h for 9 minutes. This should be able to beat 57 minutes. I particularly like scheduling in the bulk of walking when climbing up to the Burrard Street Bridge. After reaching the crest of the bridge, running faster than 11.5km/h is easy and it’s also motivating to blast by people in the process.

I’ve also been able to fine-tune my running speeds with the assistance of a treadmill. I never used treadmills until last December and I found it fairly interesting to see how physically taxing running at certain speeds are. I believe my “steady state” speed will be around 6.8 miles per hour (10.9 km/h), but I want to get this higher to allow for some walking time during the race.

I wonder if MaoXian is onto something – is the lack of spam about a particular topic a sign that particular market is in trouble? According to his theory, the Chinese (at least in his local area) are desperate to unload real estate.

Here’s a chart of the February Fed Funds futures – look how quickly the market picked up on the rate decrease and started anticipating a small chance of a surprise rate cut in February.

The price on the chart is 100 minus the percentage, so 97 would be equal to 3%.

I wrote earlier about a futures trader that swore his way into internet history. What ever happened to his position?

He liquidated for a $31,000 loss, but I was curious to see what happened to the future he was trading subsequent to the fact. We have the following:

So the supreme irony is that had he held onto the position, he would be roughly $30,000 up in profit instead of taking his $31,000 loss. This is how financial markets work – they try to squeeze the most amount of money out of the weakest hands. In this case, it was his hands that were squeezed.

Again, he made two big mistakes: Too much leverage and he should have placed a stop loss at a particular point – specifically on the morning of Monday, January 21, there was ample market liquidity to get out with a moderate loss.

People that had enough balls to be buying index futures on January 21st were handsomely rewarded in subsequent days.

Just reading about -40 degree temperatures in the middle of the Canadian prairies. Obviously this can’t be right since for the last decade the temperatures never got that low. It must be due to man-made global warming, err, climate change.

I wonder what would happen if this hits BC and killed all the mountain pine beetles? I guess we’d have some group petition to save the pine beetle for biodiversity reasons.

This one is from Alfred, about a computer game called Passage.

Unfortunately I can’t comment too much without giving too much of it ‘away’, but the only comment I have to this is that one should not get caught up in the false dichotomy fallacy – it is possible to bake your own cake, share it with others, and eat it too. Also the choices that one makes won’t always necessarily lead to optimal outcomes and it is nearly impossible to measure the weight or results of these choices except in hindsight.

BC Hydro and the BC Utility Commission (which has the authority to increase rates) has telegraphed that rates will be going up in the near future. As electricity usage has increased over the past half century, BC Hydro not only needs to make sure that they will have the capacity to generate such supply, but they will also have to generate proceeds to maintain the system to deliver the electricity. This takes expertise and money.

Right now for residential users BC Hydro charges $0.0615 per kWh, an extraordinarily cheap amount compared to other jurisdictions. The infrastructure decisions the WAC Bennett government took with respect to developing hydroelectric projects continues to pay off dividends which residential customers receive today. Business customers also receive substantially lower rates, which give power-intensive industries a competitive advantage if they choose to locate in BC.

The majority of this domestic power generation is through hydroelectricity. Hydroelectric power is a superior source for primarily one reason: you can choose when to access it – by closing or opening valves to the water reservoir, you can generate electricity on demand. This is important because what Hydro has been making a fortune doing is selling power down to the USA during peak period hours, and then closing the flood gates in the late evening and buying it back from the grid when it is considerably cheaper. If you are running a nuclear, coal, natural gas, wind, or solar power plant, you do not have this luxury.

This is why BC Hydro, despite being a net importer of electricity, has been wildly profitable – in 2007 they were able to net $466 million through trading electricity in 2007. This is also why they can afford to subsidize power rates to the degree they have.

So despite being a very profitable entity, why is Hydro increasing rates? Because they can, and because the capital they will be able to raise can be ploughed back in some obviously profitable ventures, and we’re not talking about a couple wind power farms. A future hydroelectric project (of massive proportions) will be Site C, located near Fort St. John. If constructed, it is projected to be able to generate 900 megawatts of power – comparable to two CANDU nuclear power reactors.

Once built, hydroelectric power is a “clean” source of power. Of course, when you try building a huge dam today you will encounter a lot of resistance by environmental groups when they cry that you are destroying the natural ecosystem of wherever your planned reservoir is. In the case of Site C, there is already resistance to building the site from environmentalists and First Nations groups.

Stephen Rees wrote the following:

This was also the argument that killed photo-radar. Not that it was a well run program, or could not have been made much more effective, but by reacting in knee jerk fashion to the “cash grab” argument, Gordon Campbell ensured that more British Columbian residents and visitors would die in high speed road crashes. Because the evidence is clear that well run photo radar programs reduce crash severities – and if they didn’t ICBC would not have promoted them.

The first thing the BC Liberals did when they got in control in 2001 was got rid of the photo radar program. This was a good decision from both a policy and political perspective. The only benefit photo radar provided is slowing down people in the proximity of a photo radar van.

I like how Stephen mentions “that well run photo radar programs”, as if the existing program was the only problem being that you would have to have a camera on every street in order to have the effectiveness that he wants. Considering he came from Great Britain, the country of cameras, that’s not a surprising perspective. I’d start by mounting a speed camera installed in the back of his vehicle aimed toward his speedometer and debiting his bank account $100 plus the 15% “Victim’s Surcharge” whenever it hits 51km/h. I’m sure if this technology was feasible, he would be suggesting it.

Yes, speed is correlated with deaths in automobile crashes, but speed isn’t the cause of it. The root cause is always bad decisions made by drivers, of which their choice of speed is usually one of them. You can try legislating ridiculously low speed limits (section 146(1) of the Motor Vehicle Act) and people will not comply. So now you suggest putting up photo radar to control people’s driving habits – how far are you willing to control people in the name of saving lives that won’t be saved at all?

Quoting an aggregated news source:

Quebec energy consumers – not just energy producers – are the ones who pay for the province’s new green fund. When the provincial government imposed the country’s first carbon tax last fall, it wanted producers to pay. But just as oil refiners have already done, Gaz Métro started to pass on the cost of the carbon tax this month. It began charging 0.67 cents per cubic metre of natural gas that it sells to its 170,000 customers. It will then remit $38 million to Quebec this year for its new $200-million annual green fund, aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. Pascal D’Astous, a spokesperson for Natural Resources Minister Claude Béchard, said yesterday that the government never intended to compel companies alone to pay for the green fund.

Watch out very carefully when you hear a politician saying “this tax will only be for business”. It will really cost the end-user. This is why the Conservative business tax cut from 22.12% to 15% (in 2012) will end up saving people much more money than all of their GST and income tax initiatives up to date.

Any carbon tax levied on businesses will simply get passed onto the consumer. You cannot make business “pay” for something, you will end up making the consumer pay it instead, or you will drive the business supplying the good away since the reduced demand will discourage production. This is likely the intent of carbon tax proponents – make everything so expensive that people can’t afford energy anymore.

I don’t hear those same people screaming about how “the poor get shafted by the rich, and the rich are the only ones that can afford to drive these days” when it’s effective regressive taxation policies like this that hurt the people on the bottom 50% of the income bracket the most. Cars for the top 10% and Translink for the bottom 90% seem to be the vision that governments have in store.

On previous post about the Translink fare increase, there were a couple comments. Sir Brad commented the following:

Simply, attach a transit tax to property taxes. Once the tax is applied, everyone could use the transit services without having to pay. A special hotel tax could cover the tourists.

Let’s assume that the goal was to reduce user fees to nothing and entirely fund Translink’s revenues through property taxes.

As of 2005, Translink collects $204 million, or 26% of its revenues, from property taxes, levied against residential and business property owners across the Greater Vancouver Regional District (now Metro Vancouver). The Vancouver residential Translink property tax charge is $52.37 per $100,000 in property value, which is included in the total of $598.922 per $100,000 in property value for a Vancouver property holder. So for example, if you own a $200,000 apartment in 2005 in Vancouver, you would have paid $1,197.84 in property taxes, of which $104.74 is given to Translink.

In order to fund its entire service, Translink in Vancouver would need to increase property taxes by 3.85 times, or to about $201 per $100,000 in assessed value. This would be an increase of $149 per $100,000 in assessed value.

Because property owners would pay the tax, renters would indirectly have to pay the tax as property owners would have to increase rents in order to pay for the increased taxation.

If Translink’s revenues are funded through property taxes, this means that the other forms of revenue collection would no longer have to be levied. One of these is fuel taxes.

Translink also receives 33% of its revenues, or $260 million through fuel taxes. In 2005 this was 12 cents per litre. So if they had the ability to fund their entire revenue base through property taxes, they could eliminate the fuel tax, or 12 cents per litre.

So the break-even point on whether you would like to pay more in gas taxes or Translink taxes depends on how much your property value is and how much gasoline you would consume in a year.

There are probably many, many variables here that I haven’t considered, but I was relatively surprised at how small the number would be, especially when you net the increase in property taxes with the decreased cost of fuel. What am I missing?