Double Blind

I took Translink from Downtown Vancouver to Richmond using the 98 B-Line route. Since I find it very difficult to read on the bus, I always am paying attention to the surroundings and people around me, and always find some interesting little anecdotes. Here are two.

The first story is that the downtown stops for the 98-B Line (heading back to the Granville Street Bridge) have changed – the last stop before you cross the bridge is at Nelson and Hornby Helmcken and Howe – then the next one is at 5th avenue and Granville.

There used to be a stop at Nelson and Howe and Howe and Drake, but this has stopped. But the bus navigation system must sense the old stops and still announces those stops. It seems that reprogramming the systems is probably more expensive than it is worth, especially considering the route will likely be decommissioned after the Canada Line is operational. The suburban bus continued to impress me with displaying the stop names quite accurately with the text-to-speech readout.

It is really obvious that the Millennium Line will need to be expanded to Cambie (to connect with the Canada Line) and then go all the way to Granville – Granville and Broadway is a very popular intersection. I don’t think the value proposition to go all the way out to UBC is warranted with an underground line at this time – the distance will make it very expensive. I’m beginning to look somewhat more favourably with my opinion of at-grade rail for that particular route.

The second story deals with the bus driver announcing around Aberdeen Centre that “there will be a ticket check at Richmond Centre, so have your tickets ready”. I thought this was a very strange announcement since the bus stopped at all the points before Richmond Centre. Since, unlike Gregor Robertson, I had actually paid for a valid fare, I was curious to see how many people the ticket check would have “busted”. I know there were some punks that came in through the back door that said some swear words after hearing the announcement. They got off at Westminster (one stop before Richmond Centre).

Much to my disappointment, we arrived at Richmond Centre without the promised ticket check. Was this just a psychological ploy by the driver to get the punks off the bus? I will never know!

I have only been checked twice in my entire life for a valid fare – both times were on the Skytrain (not at the station, just on the train as it traveled between stations). Obviously both times (and all bazillion times I wasn’t checked) I had a valid fare, although I think the zone system that we use is ridiculously stupid. I realize other jurisdictions have zoning systems, but I’m of the opinion that there should be a single zone for Skytrain, but for the bus system it should be zoned. Presumably it will cost Translink nothing since there are probably more people out there like Gregor that don’t pay for extra zones.

This is going to be good!

The Conservative Party has to have two opposition days by December 10th. During these opposition days, the opposition can move a motion of non-confidence.

This was originally slated to be on December 1st with the following motion:

Mr. Dion (Saint-Laurent—Cartierville) — That, in light of the Conservatives’ failure to recognize the seriousness of Canada’s economic situation, and its failure in particular to present any credible plan to stimulate the Canadian economy and to help workers and businesses in hard-pressed sectors such as manufacturing, the automotive industry and forestry, this House has lost confidence in this government, and is of the opinion that a viable alternative government can be formed within the present House of Commons.

This motion will be stalled out until next week. In the meantime, the best piece of Canadian political theatre since 1926 is going to come in the next seven days. It’s something only a political junkie can appreciate. The rest of the public is just going to shake their heads in disgust.

As part of the economic statement update, the Federal government is going to introduce legislation that will be removing the $1.75/vote (currently $1.98/vote when factoring in inflation) subsidy that political parties (that receive more than 2% of the national vote) receive yearly.

This will save the country $30 million or about 88 cents for every Canadian each year. I’ll take it.

The obvious political motives of the Conservatives is that their relative share in revenues will only decline somewhat, while the Liberals, NDP, Bloc and Green will get absolutely hammered.

The Liberals will kick and scream, but the Conservatives can just declare this a confidence motion and not allow amendments to pass (without triggering a change in government or a dissolution of government and an election). The NDP, secretly wanting to replace the Liberals as the second party of choice in this country, will be wishy-washy on this issue and will still say they will vote against this, but secretly want it to pass (they will get their wish).

After this becomes effective on April 1, 2009, the Liberal party of Canada is going to be in serious trouble – they have a huge debt to pay off, and their revenue sources have dried up considerably. The other parties that will be in deep trouble is the Green party – their only source of funding comes from federal funding, and apparently Elizabeth May racked up a huge debt in her last failed federal election campaign.

The only unintended side effect of this legislation for the Conservatives, however, is that it makes strategic voting “free” for people – no longer do they have to worry giving the Liberal party $1.98/year when they really want to be voting for the NDP. It’s fairly ironic that in my political textbook, this will cost the Conservatives more votes than the financial downfall of the Liberal party.

(Update: The Conservatives have blinked and have said that the provision to remove federal financing will not be in the Fiscal Update legislation. The government claims this was never meant to be in the legislation concerning the fiscal update, and this is true – the annexes don’t show the change. The threat of the government doing this, however, will be ever-present. I still think that if the Liberals/NDP/Bloc got together to form government that it would have been in the longer term interests of the Conservatives, but this obviously doesn’t have to happen so soon – it can happen early in 2009. One thing is for sure – the next election is likely sooner, not later.)

About a week ago, Tradesports announced that they were closing down. Tradesports was the primary operation behind the prediction market, until in the beginning of 2007 they split up into Tradesports (which dealt with sports markets) and Intrade (which dealt with everything else).

The two entities were separate in name only; they shared the same back office, same software and same operations. There was a significant outage in 2008 that affected both operations at once which validates the assumption.

Sports was the prime money-maker for the operation, while the political markets were secondary. Initially, they didn’t think that political predictions would be the prime marketing point for the company, which is why they tried to split the company – to distance themselves from the “online gambling” market and into the slightly more credible “prediction market” sector.

On November 18, 2008 they announced they were shutting down the Tradesports side, presumably to distance themselves completely from that area. The fact that this was a couple months away from the most profitable money-maker in all of sports (the Super Bowl on February 1, 2009) was even more so odd.

As many that read this site know, I have profitably cleared a low 5-digit figure over the last few years from using prediction markets, but I have stopped using Intrade a few months ago. At the end of October 2007, I withdrew everything but a token sum in the account, and proceeded to squander that token amount on two fairly long-odds-but-good-value bets relating to the Democratic VP nomination and how long Hillary would last before she pulled out. The money I did pull out of Intrade (in a series of three or four cheques) did come in a timely fashion, and they did clear my credit union without issues.

However, I think this will change for future users, as I think Intrade’s financial viability is in question. There are a few signs out there.

It is clear that they took some serious damage with their margin system and could not adequately protect their users’ funds – they announced that effective today that margin could no longer be used by members. (FYI, I never used margin). What happened is that there were some contracts that people leveraged up, and could not de-leverage without affecting the market price and were left with accounts with heavy negative balances, and corresponding positive balances on the other side. Since they had to pay off the people with the positive balances, they had to collect from the negative balances – something they obviously can’t do. They possibly took losses during the last presidential election (what would otherwise be a money-maker).

There are a few other red flags concerning Intrade, one being putting up a credit market on their own future viability – they actually have a market whether the business will still be in operation by a certain date! This is like buying insurance from a company with a policy on whether the insurance company will still be in business or not – if you “win” and the insurance company goes bankrupt, you still lose by not getting paid.

Intrade has had a history of showing very bad judgement on judging certain contracts. The North Korea Missile contract was a well-known debacle (one that I made money on because I knew they were stubborn enough to rule a certain way about it), and my ability to trust them on judging certain other markets correctly was highly suspect, so I only stuck to as-unambiguous-as-possible contracts.

One other issue with Intrade dealt with how its commission structure actually was used to take money from its customers through commission differentials – basically multi-candidate contracts (with a single winner) would have combined bid prices greater than 100% because of how the commission structure worked. Essentially the exchange would be able to arbitrage by selling contracts of everybody commission-free and make some money this way off the back of the people providing liquidity on the site. While this is not illegal or the moral equivalent of stealing, it is something that was rather disturbing about their model.

The other red flag dealt with the actual CEO of Intrade, John Delaney. He sent me an email on April 2007 out of the blue saying he would be in Vancouver and wanted to know if we could meet up. Apparently he had read somewhere that I made this presentation on prediction markets (he probably didn’t read further and realize it was at Barcamp, which is not exactly the most academically accredited event, although make no mistake – it was well worth going to). I said yes to the meetup, and we eventually met up for lunch at some Japanese restaurant in downtown Vancouver.

The conversation was fairly strange. It began with 10 minutes of small talk, about how he likes visiting the more “dodgy” areas of places, but after that he drilled me for contacts regarding software development and web-based user interfaces which caught me off guard.

Of course, knowing him for all of 20 minutes at this point, I didn’t really care to be used as a social stepping stone, and more or less said that there is a lot of talent available in downtown Vancouver. I wasn’t about to give him a rolodex of names and phone numbers.

Once he realized that he was getting nowhere with me (which was very apparent), the conversation shifted to small-talk again and that was about it. At least he paid the bill. The whole meeting left a bad taste in my mouth.

If this is his style, I can see why the business is taking a hit. It’s amazing that Intrade has gotten to the point where it is today, quite by accident.

I would highly recommend to stay away from Intrade as your money is likely not safe, and I will not be using their service again.

This is probably the best condensation I’ve seen in terms of how the media views the differences between three basic costs of life – fuel, food and shelter.

When fuel prices go up, it’s a “bad thing” – higher costs mean “evil” oil producers stealing more money from people.
When food prices go up, it’s “so-so” – higher costs mean farmers are sustaining their lifestyles, but at the expense of consumers having to pay more at the supermarket.
When shelter (home) prices go up, it’s “great” – higher home equity for everybody!

The reason for this sentiment is that we typically “outsource” our fuel needs to various companies (gas stations), and we also “outsource” our food production needs to farmers and the supermarkets that retail it for us. However, a large number of people decide to buy equity into their own homes, instead of outsourcing the option (i.e. renting).

If the reader finds this a funny way to think of home ownership, here is a thought experiment. Let’s say at the age of 30 I wanted to take an equity stake in my current and future fuel needs. I take out a loan to buy enough Exxon stock such that the annual dividends will cover my fuel purchases for the year. If fuel prices go up, the dividends likely go up as well, so I am sheltered from the vicissitudes of worrying about my monthly fuel bill, and all I have to do is pay off a regular and predictable mortgage on my Exxon stock. In 30 years, when the note is paid off, likely I have a big capital gain in my Exxon stock, which I could cash in at retirement if I want to downsize to less driving and fuel use. Or I can pass it on to my kids.

When gas prices were at 39.9 cents a litre nearly a decade ago, I was wondering to myself “Is there any way I can buy 5000 litres of gasoline at this price and be able to use it at 40 cents a pop?”. If I had invested in Exxon and invested the dividends over the last 10 years, I would have ended up with a 160% gain over 10 years, or about 10% annualized. It turns out that Exxon would have been one of the worst investment decisions relative to other companies (for both tax reasons and size). However, the point is that such an income stream would have been sufficient.

I don’t recommend this strategy at present since timing this sort of stuff is absolutely essential, just like how timing is essential if you want to make a return on investment in your home. In terms of the energy market, most companies out there will be finishing off their previously allocated capital projects, but in 2009 and beyond, with current oil prices, you can be sure that they aren’t going to be investing in anything extra other than wrapping up what they have presently. If or when oil drops to $30/barrel, I’ll start looking seriously at energy again since the stocks will have been beaten up even more than they have been.

All I suggest to people is to stay out of debt and look out for opportunities when you see them.

This story, if it turns out to be true, is a sad state of affairs in the mindset of academia today:

OTTAWA – The Carleton University Students’ Association has voted to drop cystic fibrosis as the beneficiary of its annual Shinearama fundraiser, arguing that the illness is not “inclusive” enough.

Cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men” said the motion read to student councillors, who voted almost unanimously in favour of it.

The following statement goes into the “fallacy of composition” mode, but I will give it a shot anyway:

One reason why I haven’t seriously considered going back to “higher education” is simply because university wasn’t what it used to be 30 years ago. The education one can receive one can simply get with a lot of self-study – and much cheaper, at that. The only value of such institutions is to be able to bring a bunch of like-minded people together, but even this has declined with the advent of the internet where it is relatively easy to find a group of peers that are experts.

One truth is unmistakable – credentials are increasingly unreliable, and the only residual value for them is when they involve some sort of legal standing (for example, you can’t legally practice law without a law credential, even if you can do so otherwise).

In order to beat my last year’s time of 56 minutes and 5 seconds, I decided I need to start a month earlier than my usual training regimen (which has been to start after New Year’s Day). My goal for 2009 is to reach a run time of 56 minutes and 4 seconds, or faster. I’m in a higher age category this time around, so my relative performance in the 30-34 group will hopefully be better.

So I’m getting back on the treadmill again, using the boilerplate “Learn to Run 10k” template from SportMedBC, which graduates up the running over time. I’ve attached the template that I am using here since getting on SportMedBC’s site is a pain (they require a login/password to get to the training schedule).

From what I remember of previous years, it will take a few weeks to eventually get rid of the physiological inertia and improve my endurance, which is horrible at the moment. I did the first training run today, and things felt fine, although I know that the program starts really easy to begin with.

My schedule gives me two months of “lee-way” from the actual race time. After I finish the 14 weeks of training, the next step will be to improve my speed. Typically I put the “walk” on the treadmill to 3.8 miles per hour, and the “run” to 6.8 miles per hour. Optimally if I could get the run time up to 7.5 miles per hour, that would translate into a 50 minute run time. In practice, this means that there’s enough of a buffer time for a one-minute walk up the hill to the Burrard Street Bridge.

I also have another five pounds of weight to contend with that I didn’t have to last year – unfortunately, I managed to rack up most of those pounds during the federal election campaign – probably more of a toll on my health than I would have otherwise imagined.

Just like last year, I’m concerned that my extra weight is going to impair my run time. Time will tell.

I notice that Anthony has started writing on his weblog.

He’s highly intelligent and well worth reading.

I noticed this news bit from CKNW, taken from a government press release:

The cost to set up the new 8-1-1 system: just over three million dollars.
The cost to maintain it each year, about 5.5 million dollars.
But Health Minister George Abbott says the benefit to people across the province will be priceless.
Abbott says the new health information line will include access to prenatal and senior programs, dieticians, pharmacists and registered nurses; a first of its kind in canada.
And given the instant popularity of 9-1-1, Abbott says they’re ready for a big demand for this new system.

I wonder if the bolded statement is a mistake since using 911 frequency as a justification to introduce a new X-1-1 service is horrible.

One of the values of 911 is that it has unambiguously been “the” emergency number. While the recognition of this is still likely to continue, I am now personally getting confused with all of the X-1-1 services out there. Specifically we now have:

211 – A “health service” number (except in BC)
311 – Non-emergency emergency number (some places in North America, not BC)
411 – Directory Assistance (universal)
511 – Transportation/Weather info (not really used in Canada)
611 – Customer Service (for cell customers)
711 – TDD (Telecommunication Device for the Deaf) number
811 – A “health service” number (BC-Only), in the USA a “Call before digging here” number.
911 – Emergency!

The fact that the X-1-1 implementations are inconsistent amongst different telephone jurisdictions except for 411 and 911 would potentially create branding problems.

It is much beyond the time to discuss this, but I wonder if somebody decided to invent the “phone number system” from scratch whether they’d continue using such things. It would almost be like as if people still used IP addresses (e.g. 209.85.171.99) to access their favorite internet sites instead of using DNS (google.com).

We’d probably all be better if there was some wholesale replacement of the phone number system, but the chances of this happening are zero (and nor should it happen; it would be tremendously expensive from a technical and a psychological/user training perspective). Also, a lot of social memes (e.g. “Dude, I got this hot girl’s phone number!”) would be consigned to memories of the past, kind of like how a lot of cultural memes about dealing with poop from horse carriages evaporated when automobiles replaced them.

Four years ago I wrote a post about how “Happy Holidays” has become the pervasive end-of-year phrase rather than “Merry Christmas”.

As I predicted a few years ago, the “Rockefeller Christmas Tree” has now become the “Tree at Rockefeller Center“. There is no mention of Christmas anywhere. It’s rather amusing to sift through the terminology used to avoid it, however (e.g. “Yule”, “Holidays”, “End of year”, “Season”, etc.)

Richmond Watch has an amusing article as to the ads that he/she has collected over the last little while and has noted which companies say “holidays” and which one says “Christmas”.