Now that Gregor Robertson has sown up the Vision Vancouver nomination, I am predicting that if Robertson runs a mediocre campaign or better, he will become the next mayor of Vancouver.
Subsequent Edit –
Results, 2008 Vision Vancouver mayoralty nomination:
Gregor Robertson 3,495 (52.0%)
Raymond Louie 2,244 (33.4%)
Allan de Genova 981 (14.6%)
Has anybody ever accidentally put their USB device (in this case a mouse) in the network jack of their laptop? On my computer, the network jack is right next to the USB slot in the back of the computer. So I’ve usually been sticking my mouse into the USB slot blindly.
A couple days ago, I put my mouse into what I thought was the USB slot, and I was sticking the thing in and out of the slot and trying to figure out why it wasn’t working – normally you see the glow on the bottom of the mouse (it’s one of those optical mice).
I notice my volume was turned off, and I turn it up, and I was expecting to hear that do-dee sound, but nothing came up.
So I finally stood up from my seat (simply because I was too lazy to do before) and noticed I plugged it into my network slot. The USB attachment and the network slot are almost an identical width.
When any introduction of government regulations mandated for vehicles are introduced, the cost gets borne by the customer.
A great example was the requirement to include airbags – each airbag adds approximately $200-$500 of costs, depending on circumstances. I won’t debate here whether the cost-benefit ratio is a good deal or not.
Another example are emission standards – catalytic converters add approximately $200 of costs to a new vehicle.
It becomes a matter of trading off safety and efficiency and cost, three variables which for the most part were optimized twenty years ago. Now the tradeoff appears to be overwhelmingly toward safety and efficiency, making costs of vehicles to be excessively high.
Not surprisingly, somebody has brought up some opposition against new emission standards using the cost argument. The basic argument is that the amount of emissions reduced is not worth the cost to consumers.
It is instructive to look at the new standards and look at automotive emission history. Most of the low-lying fruit to be picked in the emissions game was conquered when the catalytic converter was mandated in all vehicles. The catalytic converter was probably one of the best environmental cost tradeoffs in the last quarter of the 20th century.
For those that don’t know, a catalytic converter converts unspent fuel, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides into more basic components (carbon dioxide, water, and nitrogen, all three of which people can breath without any toxic effects). Unspent fuel emitted into the atmosphere is much more dangerous from an environmental perspective. If you ever fill up your vehicle and spilled half a liter of gasoline on the ground, chances are you have done more damage to the local airshed than if you burned up the gasoline in your car driving.
Catalytic converters, however, require engines to run with more fuel – despite this efficiency gap, cars are still more environmentally beneficial with catalytic converters.
Now that the attack on unspent fuel has mostly been conquered (there is some additional work to be done, but this is the final 10%), governments have decided to regulate emission standards further to target “carbon content”. Roughly, they are targeting 30% less emissions over the span of a decade.
Unfortunately, we are getting at the stage where basic chemistry gets in the way of the problem – hydrocarbons (fuel) burns to make water and carbon dioxide. If the government mandate is to lower the emissions of carbon, there isn’t too much that can be done other than lowering the amount of gasoline consumed. The only way to do that is to lighten vehicles further, shrink engines, or change the nature of the fuel consumed (which would correspondingly result in a completely new engine design).
Any of the three will inevitably result in one common factor: increased cost.
The reaction against the Conservative party’s advertising continues in the media.
In other words, the campaign was a huge success.
The worst thing to happen to an advertising campaign is to fade into obscurity. This campaign was designed to “offend” and to get the carbon tax on the preemptive radar. Utterly, and completely brilliant.
Everybody senses blood in the shark pool, where the NPA is swimming with open wounds. From CKNW:
Vancouver school trustee Eleanor Gregory has quit the NPA. She has resigned her membership in the non partisan association and joined Vision Vancouver.
She had already endorsed Vision’s Gregory Robertson for mayor. Now she says she has decided to actively support that effort and sever here ties with the NPA.
Although Peter Ladner might have won the nomination for the NPA mayor (which wasn’t surprising considering the poll that was released a few days before that had him a statistically significant margin over Sam Sullivan), he’s going to lose the war against Gregor Robertson. His only chance is if COPE is silly enough to nominate their own candidate for mayor, which isn’t likely.
Oddly enough, the nomination of Ladner was a positive move for the NPA, as he will be able to partially shed himself of the baggage that Sam Sullivan accumulated during his term as mayor. He won’t be able to shed his affiliation with the slate, however, and this is going to kill him in the upcoming election. Right now the NPA would be lucky to keep 3 people in council coming November. And you can be pretty certain that Sam Sullivan isn’t going to go out of his way in his remaining months in office to get Peter Ladner elected.
The Conservative party came up with a mocking website – Will you be tricked – to preemptively deflect the upcoming carbon tax proposal by the federal Liberals.
I don’t know how much of an effect this will have, but there is a pioneering element which should be noted for the political science history records. Apparently in southern Ontario, certain gasoline stations have television screens where advertising can be displayed when you fill up. The Conservatives bought advertising on gasoline stations to advertise that the Liberals are going to propose a national carbon tax, which will raise the cost of fuel. Pretty sharp idea from a political perspective.
Of course, the sad reality is that there can be an immediate 15 cent drop in gas prices if you just got rid of the gas tax, and got rid of GST on gasoline sales, but they will of course never do this. I don’t think people actually mind the notion of gasoline taxes, but they do mind the fact that it goes into the “consolidated revenue fund” and can be spent whatever way possible, in ways that governments usually spend money (inefficiently).
Going back to the aforementioned site, there are a few things that only political hacks would understand properly. When you load up the flash applet, for example, it says “Do you think it’s easy to load websites?” is a trick on Dion’s “Do you think it’s easy to make choices?” statement he said in the 2006 Liberal leadership race. I also love the upper-right hand side where they link to a clip of Dion saying “very seriously a carbon tax”. Whoever came up with this flash applet knew what the heck they were doing. But whether non-political people will get the full breadth of this? Who knows.
The person that finished 51N124W, Tim Dinsdale, produced a video titled “Precisely Nowhere” and outlines his (and his brother’s) visit to 51N124W.
Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 are linked.
Part 1 contains an introduction of what degree confluence points are. As readers of this weblog may know, I have finished over the past 2 years 9 confluence points. Six were in the USA, two were in Canada and one was in Morocco. All of these points were previously visited by people, but the point is that sites change over time and it is interesting to make comparisons. For example, 32N104W was considerably more lush than it was when it was last visited 6 years ago, probably due to the heavy rainfall the area received that year.
The next confluence on my task list is in my backyard – 49N122W – just south of Cultus Lake. Technically the confluence is in Washington state, but the approach is easier from the Canadian side of the border. It’s been nearly 7 years since this point has been last documented.
Hillary Clinton dropped out, which means that my previous bet that she would last until the end of June was unsuccessful. Sometimes you can get value on bets, but not be able to collect. I had suspected that Clinton would make more of a go trying to get delegates from Florida seated, but it appears that party pressure managed to get to her and she was forced to bow out. I am also curious to see how this influences the 2012 presidential nomination race (yes, I know four years is a long time to be considering this sort of thing) but whether Clinton will has any aspirations to run for president remains to be seen.
In terms of timing this, I think Clinton did the best for the four years ahead – by doing so now she isn’t seen as employing a scorched earth strategy, but she will be seen as battling it out until the very end of the primary season.
I wonder what would have happened if Clinton managed to score another 100 delegates than she actually did and the result was even – it would have likely gone to convention (but then again, the odds that I received wouldn’t have been as good).
I also flawed some of the execution of this particular trade – there were particular exit points that I could have taken (around 75%) but I did not leave open orders which would have been hit. So my trading of this particular issue was also incredibly sloppy.
I found this article titled The Bankruptcy of Mass Transit to be rather insightful. Probably the key quotation is the following:
In Europe what they discovered about 15 years ago is that centralized funding creates all sorts of incentives for locals to waste money. So just about everywhere in Europe they have stopped their national transit programs and forced it down to the local level. They’ve said, “If you want to spend all that money on transit, you go right ahead.” In a sense, they de-nationalized funding and they de-nationalized responsibility.
This is an interesting concept and reminds me of what happens in certain strata complexes. Let’s pretend you live in a condominium where hot water is a shared resource and the cost comes directly out of the strata fee. As a single member of the strata, your cost to use hot water is directly subsidized by the number of people in your strata, so you don’t have to really consider how much hot water you use as a result. The net result is that the people that use less hot water subsidize those that use lots of hot water.
The same applies for a lot of programs that are sponsored federally, but get transferred down to lower levels of government. It creates a lot of opportunity to play “politics” and extract money out of the system in every step by pandering to the various political support groups.
The public transit system we have in Vancouver is quite good if your destination is downtown Vancouver or a 5 minute walk to/from stations along the Skytrain route. Otherwise, there is still no competition against the automobile.
The Vancouver mayor’s race, similar to last year, will be equivalently interesting this year. Last election (2005), on the NPA side, Christy Clark lost the nomination to Sam Sullivan, and during the general election Sam Sullivan prevailed over (COPE candidate) Jim Green by a very slim margin.
This year, Sullivan’s nomination is being challenged by Peter Ladner, another city councilor. Both candidates have been signing up people for the upcoming nomination and have been releasing election propaganda showing why they are the better candidate.
I will look at one survey released by the Peter Ladner camp – A poll claiming that he is the favoured candidate by a margin of nearly 2:1. Doing some stats work, I was curious to see how credible this claim was. From a 500 person survey (assuming randomized distribution), 102 of them identified themselves as NPA supporters.
Out of those 102 NPA supporters, 58 said they would support Ladner for the nomination, 30 would support Sullivan and 14 were undecided.
Is this statistically credible? For a confidence interval of 95%, your error bars would be around 9.7% using a normally distributed sample based upon a 50% expectation. For a 60% expectation the error bars go down to 9.5%. Assuming the worst-case error margin, the 9.7%, we have the following:
Ladner 57% [95% confidence range: 47-67%]
Sullivan 29% [95% confidence range: 29-39%]
So the error bars aren’t overlapping. If you apply a 99% confidence interval, you raise the bars to 12.7% in each direction:
Ladner 57% [99% confidence range: 44-70%]
Sullivan 29% [99% confidence range: 16-42%]
So Ladner is looking pretty good, assuming random statistical methodology. Of course, this survey is likely not to be random – for example, the sampling is likely biased toward people that actually answer questions truthfully, or even know who either candidate are, etc. Also, the demographic impact of the inability to call mobile phone lines for sampling can be corrected for if you know those inputs.
Finally, the math is wrong – there are three inputs, mainly the “unknown” vote. If you remove those 14 undecided voters and scale the rest of the rest of the 88 votes, you’ll have overlapping error boundaries on the 99% confidence interval. Ladner should feel OK about this survey, but he can hardly feel like he clinched the nomination without doing a more thorough survey.
Fortunately for Ladner, Sullivan’s survey of 300 doesn’t indicate too much other than that half the voters are “aware” of Sullivan, and the biggest piece of statistical quackery I have seen is on page 9, where 30% of decided voters support Sullivan vs. 24% for Ladner. Of course what they don’t mention is that this is 51 vs. 36 of a sample space of at most 160 people. This is the definition of “statistically insignificant”.
On the Vision Vancouver side, in my books Gregor Robertson has it wrapped up – this survey provides some statistically insignificant evidence that this is the case (out of the 80 ID’ed Vision Vancouver voters, 41 of them said they would support Robertson). Unless if COPE nominates a mayoral candidate, it would take an incompetent campaign run by Vision Vancouver to lose the upcoming election. The NPA’s best (and likely only) chance is to get COPE to run a candidate for mayor.
The easy conclusion is that it’s likely in the best interests of Vision Vancouver and COPE to cut a deal where each slate would run a certain number of people for council in exchange for COPE not running a candidate for mayor.