Double Blind

Justin writes about a Wired article discussing counter-measures of laser weapons. He then complains about terrorism as being the cited reason for the development of such counter-measures.

While this is true, I have an even more blunt approach.

Laser weapons, at least for significant military applications (specifically, jets nailing each other out of the sky with lasers, not missiles, or jets taking out tanks on the ground with lasers) is not going to happen.

The simple reason is that lasers are too inefficient and you’d need an on-board nuclear reactor to send a beam of energy at the relevant distance. You’d also need to be able to focus this beam for a long enough period of time to cause thermal damage, which is not a trivial problem to solve when the originating source of the laser is a jet (on the ground you’ve got line-of-sight issues which makes lasers militarily impractical). Finally, the thermal damage that you are trying to inflict on your target is something that you’d also have to be solving yourself, mainly because when you’re pumping that much power, you are going to cause a lot of waste heat to be generated. A lot.

Militarily, there may be a use for lasers with electronic jamming, but you’re not going to see anything remotely resembling “Phasers” on Star Trek where you can blow things up and melt rocks with a hand-held device. There is too much waste heat generated at the generation source to make this feasible.

The wired article links to a video that shows missiles getting blown out of the sky with infrared lasers, but ultimately kinetic interceptors will be a much more realistic anti-missile defense than lasers will ever be.

Starbucks has apparently decided to keep their breakfast sandwiches.

This is contrary to their turnaround strategy of sticking to what made them ascend in the first place – coffee.

The company says that they have mitigated the negatives associated with the sandwiches (including the smell of grease in the shop), but in reality this will likely distract employees from their main task of serving coffee.

While on paper this decision is probably a financial winner, from a strategic perspective this might have a higher cost than getting rid of the food lines in the coffee shop. Considering my previous analysis assuming that they would concentrating on providing better coffee, this throws a wrench into the overall formula. Factoring in the net negative, I’d put the stock on my watchlist now at $11 (80% of sales) a share instead of $12 before.

The company still has excellent branding, but they’re just struggling to find another niche in the world – and it certainly isn’t going to be about breakfast sandwiches.

Here is an interesting post of a couple videos at a law lecture in Virginia about why it never works in your favour to talk to the police, even if you are innocent. Inevitably the basis is that by revealing any sort of information, whether factual or not, can be pinned against information that is not of your knowledge and you could be convicted with it even if you had not committed the crime.

The videos are about 30 minutes (from a criminal defense lawyer) and 20 minutes (from a police officer), but it is well worth the time to watch.

These videos cover the US’s fifth amendment rights, effectively extending into the right to keep one’s mouth shut during a police interview (Miranda v. Arizona was the landmark trial which led to this).

Canadian readers (most readers here are) should know that Section 11 and 13 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms effectively cover the same rights for the issues discussed above.

There will be three seats for grabs on September 8, 2008. Two of them are in Quebec, one is in Ontario.

This is an important by-election as it will be a rather precious data point on whether the Liberals will pull the plug this autumn or not on the government. It will also serve as a mini-referendum on Dion’s Green Shift plan.

The two Quebec ridings will have pre-determined outcomes – Saint-Lambert is likely to go Bloc, while Westmount-Ville-Marie will likely go Liberal.

and

Finally, the seat in Ontario is in Guelph:

This will be an interesting battle – Guelph is a manufacturing center, which has been hit by the economic downtown.  Whether the people will choose to take this out on the Conservatives (“they didn’t do enough to slow this”) or the Liberals (“their plans to improve the sector are not going to work”) remains to be seen.  There is a small hint, taken from the 2007 Ontario Provincial Election, that has identical electoral boundaries and yielded the following result:

We see that support for the Liberals has not gone up, but the Green vote has gone up enormously at the expensive of the provincial Conservatives and NDP.

Guelph will be the political battleground over the next month and a half – if the Liberals lose this seat, they are going to be in deep, deep trouble.

Everybody on the left side of the political spectrum is looking at the CBC article titled “Federal government runs $517M deficit in April, May“. I’ll take a swipe at you here, Declan.

I don’t see people addressing the source document – the Fiscal Monitor, something that can be subscribed to from the Minister of Finance – they fixed their contact form.

I am curious why people are harping now about the April and May months, when they could have just looked at the March month and saw that there was a $1.0 billion deficit for that period as well.

So clearly, the proper headline, to be as sensationalist as possible would be “Conservative government plunges Canada into $1.5 billion dollar deficit over the past quarter”.

A lot of this is very short term noise in our budgetary framework – despite running surplus amounts for the past decade in the country, there were quarterly stretches that had deficits. The paragraph from the fiscal monitor tried to address this preemptively:

The results for the first two months of the fiscal year are not indicative of the outcome for the year as a whole. Financial results can be volatile on a monthly basis due to variations in the timing of significant payments or receipts. A quarterly update of the 2008–09 budgetary surplus projection will be provided in the June Fiscal Monitor, which will be published in late August.

Unfortunately, nobody will ever read this, and media will sensationalize the headline deficit amount (and it get wrong, in the process).

When governments get vilified for publishing information, it is not surprising to see the availability or quality of information decline.

Where most of the focus should have gone is that government spending growth has not changed since the Liberal era. I wrote about this in 2003, and I will write about it again today. It has still gone on a trajectory that is consistently above inflation and if it weren’t for Alberta, we’d all be in seriously bad shape.

On a yearly basis (which is a much more relevant measurement), the government will end up in a surplus situation, unless if oil crashes to 60 bucks a barrel.

What’s unfortunate is that we could have paid off half the national debt if we had just kept spending growth at the level of inflation over the past 15 years.

The financial system is a modern miracle – it allows value to be quantified in the form of an arbitrary medium commonly known as money.

The central tenant is that you should be able to exchange money for goods at a market rate which is determined by supply and demand. The reverse is also true – you should be able to exchange goods for money at a market rate.

When this works smoothly, markets are considered to be liquid. For example, 293,000 contracts of crude oil traded on July 23, 2008. Since one contract is 1,000 barrels of oil, this represents a sum of approximately 36 billion dollars worth of oil that swapped hands. In this data is likely people that are quickly trading contracts for speculative profit, but as a third party, you will be able to get that oil or be able to sell oil for a specified price.

I have always maintained that in order for the financial system to be stable, liquidity takes precedence over price stability. In other words, if you cannot make a marketplace, the price becomes irrelevant – the financial system will collapse.

Enter in Zimbabwe, with the introduction of the 100-billion dollar bill, apparently enough to buy a loaf of bread at their current prices. Note I said currently – in a week this will likely no longer be the case. It is becoming to the point where the value in the paper is worth more than the actual value represented by the currency.

So in all respects, liquidity in the Zimbabwe marketplace has collapsed. Apparently gas coupons are being used by a particular business as a store of value. I wouldn’t want to be living in that country, even if they didn’t have political problems (of which 20 years of mismanagement have clearly lead to this point).

Fortunately, collapses of liquidity usually happen with plenty of precursor signals, none of which are present in the USA.

Just logging in some grocery expenses for future comparisons. I absolutely love purchasing fresh produce and this is the time of year to be doing it, when the harvests are coming in.

I bought half a kilo of fresh apricots (1.79/pound), half a kilo of cherries ($3.89/pound – yes, I know this is relatively expensive, but they looked rather nice) and half a kilo of blueberries ($3.59/pound). I also bought 7 ears of corn ($0.50/ear) – I remember the days 10 years ago when you used to be able to buy corn for 10 cents a piece during the peak harvest time, but corn-based ethanol has put an end to that unfortunately.

Finally, I bought a 2/3 pound rib-eye cut steak (at about $11.50/pound).

So the total for this was about $21, not a bad haul considering how long this food will last (although the steak has already been consumed). If I wanted to be economical about things, cherries, blueberries and rib-eye steak would not have been on the list.

Corn is beautifully simple to prepare – you can either immerse them in boiling water (after removing the green shells), or you can keep them in the green shells and just throw them on top of the grill and let the corn steam in its own humidity. After cooking, add just a hint of butter and salt and eat mercilessly.

The Government of Canada managed to raise $4,254,710,327 in a wireless spectrum auction.

This is a massive amount of money, but it also reveals the expectations of the bidders in terms of how much revenues they can make out of the Canadian wireless marketplace.

Taking a look at the bidder summary, we have the following firms:

The top three dogs (Rogers, Telus, Bell) took approximately 62% of the auctions, but this left space for other companies (which bidded as numbered corporations) like Shaw Cable.

Either way, it will be interesting to see how quickly the other companies can get into the marketplace, and what the majors will do to try to squeeze them out of the market, just as they successfully did with Fido (now a marketing arm of Rogers) and Clearnet (now Telus).

This is also a major coup for the Federal government, who undoubtedly managed to find a way to make gold out of thin air.

This is a very simple calculation.

If you take the budgetary revenues from all three government levels (Federal, Provincial and Municipal), and divide it by the population for each, you get the following:

Federal: $7,260 per capita
Provincial (BC): $8,690 per capita
Municipal (City of Vancouver): $1,860 per capita

Total tax bill: $17,810 per capita.

Lots of inefficiencies out there, just waiting to be streamlined. Direct taxes for the everyday person includes:

1. Income taxes
2. Excise taxes (GST, PST, Fuel taxes)
3. Property taxes (Municipal and Property Transfer)
4. Mandatory healthcare fees (e.g. MSP)
5. Other fees (e.g. License fees)

Indirect taxes include an unthinkable list, but primarily would incorporate the effect of business taxation.

There’s just a lot of tax out there and it will only continue to get worse as governments continue to expand their reach.

I read this gem on CKNW a couple days ago:

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business is out with what it’s claiming is a conservative estimate of this week’s losses from the blackout in downtown Vancouver.

Western Vice President Laura Jones says the tally looks to be about 36 million dollars or about 75 hundred dollars per business.

She says the number is based on losses from a similar incident in Ontario in 2003, “Two or three days of lost sales can make or break your month, can make or break your quarter in some cases. So it is a very, very serious issue for those businesses that have been effected.”

Jones says the CFIB is looking to pair with the Downtown Business Improvement Association to conduct a more accurate survey over the coming month.

Jones also says BC Hydro should not be so quick to discount the idea of compensation, claiming it would be almost expected in the private sector.

Has Laura Jones ever heard of business interruption insurance? It’s incumbent on all businesses to properly structure their risk profile, including the risk that a fire will erupt underground in downtown Vancouver and take out half the power grid. Usually what businesses do is raise prices slightly to pay for the insurance premiums.

Of course, nobody plans for a contingency where power goes out for a couple days in downtown Vancouver which is why most owners would take the risk of it happening. Any businesses that go down as a result of two days’ lost business certainly were on the brink of going down anyway.

Expecting handouts from BC Hydro just amounts to a taxpayer subsidy, and I think Jones and the CFIB should be absolutely ashamed by these comments.

What makes this event different from other utilities is that unlike cable and telephone, electricity consumption is mostly a variable cost (use more energy, pay more – use less, pay less), and this variable cost includes the fact that the service is available on-demand 24 hours a day.