Double Blind

It’s been awhile since I did this, but I will be making some predictions for 2009. Note whenever I do this, my “hit rate” is slightly better than throwing darts blind at a dartboard, so take these predictions with a grain of salt – if I manage to get a few correct it is because of blind luck, rather than any sort of prognostication skills.

But first, we will get into my 2008 failed predictions:

1. Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination (oops).
2. Sarah Palin was a good VP choice for McCain (oops).
3. Bob Rae would win the next Liberal Leadership Race (oops).
4. Saying the stock market hit a bottom when Bear Stearns went bankrupt (oops). Thankfully I didn’t put too much money on that one.
5. “The era of cheap fuel is truly over, barring some major technological discovery.” – May 22, 2008 (oops). Although I was still making the argument that $1.30/litre gas is relatively cheap.
6. Predicting a significant political event will occur from a photograph that will later be revealed to be completely doctored.

For the 2009 predictions, my judgment of “risk” will be defined by the following:

(e) = easy prediction
(m) = medium-risk prediction
(h) = high-risk prediction

Politics
1. (e) Stephen Harper will be Prime Minister on December 31, 2009.
2. (m) Barack Obama will have an approval rating of less than 40% on December 31, 2009.

Economics
3. (m) Canada’s projected deficit for 2009-2010 (when accounting for actual fiscal performance as judged by the October Fiscal Montior) will be -$30 billion, plus or minus 10%. (i.e. the cumulative deficit from April 2009 to October 2009 will be -17.5 billion).
4. (h) Canada will repeal legislation to tax income trust distributions.
5. (h) The yield on a 30-year US treasury bond be below 3% by December 31, 2009.
6. (m) The Canada-US dollar exchange rate will decline (i.e. US dollar will strengthen, CAD will weaken) from January 1 to December 31 (currently 0.8227 as I write this).
7. (m) The S&P 500 will close December 31, 2009 at 825, plus or minus 10%.
8. (m) Oil will end the year at US$35/barrel, plus or minus 15%.
9. (m) Median condominium sale price in the Greater Vancouver area will decline 18-23% from December 2008 to December 2009.
10. (e) GM or Ford will recapitalize, regardless of any ‘bailout’. (i.e. this will involve the conversion of debt to equity in a bankruptcy or prepackaged arrangement, significantly diluting existing shareholders).
11. (m) Q4-2009 real GDP will be lower than Q4-2008 real GDP.

Geopolitical
12. (h) At least one Latin American country will go through some sort of ‘significant revolution’ by years’ end.
13. (h) A nuclear emission will occur in the atmosphere by years’ end. This could be due to either a nuclear meltdown or atmospheric nuclear weapon detonation.
14. (m) The USA will not incur a terrorist attack directly resulting in the deaths of more than 5 individuals.

Culture
15. (m) The new Star Trek movie will “suck”. Let’s define “suck” as “not as bad as Star Trek 5, but in or around Star Trek 3, or the last three next generation Star Trek movies”.
16. (e) Canucks will actually make the playoffs this year…
17. (h) … but {the Canucks will} lose in the second round of the playoffs.
18. (e) Bittorrent networks, despite bandwidth throttling, packet shaping and other measures by ISPs, will continue to thrive.
19. (e) By the end of 2009, you still will not be able to find a cell phone plan in Canada that will have 200 minutes, unlimited evening and weekends, caller ID and voicemail for $25/mo. Data rates for mobile phones will still be “ridiculously expensive”.
20. (m) Facebook will be somewhat marginalized by the end of 2009; this is sort of analogous to what happened to Myspace in 2006 – i.e. it will still be a significant service, but not the “wonder darling” of the tech industry it used to be.
21. (e) Facebook and Twitter will not go public.
22. (m) Global warming (climate change) will no longer be the primary environmental focus by year’s end.

I encourage everybody reading this to take a risk and post their own predictions, with the full understanding that you can look like an utter idiot after a year is up.

I’ve been writing about this guy so much that he just might get a court injunction against me one day.

As you all know, he wrote this book professing doom-and-gloom in the Canadian real estate market, which will cause an economic depression. So now he’s starting up an online survivalist business. It sells survivalist type of stuff, including survival kits, MRE’s, solar panels, etc.

Business-wise, the synergy with the book is pretty good, actually. It’s ironic, however, that now he is eligible for his parliamentary pension (with 7.6 years of service in Parliament, this should be about $39,000/yr) that the country better not collapse.

That said, the margins that he is charging for this products are quite high and people can easily shop around the internet for significantly cheaper forms of what he’s selling. For example, the MREs he is selling for CAD$129 can be obtained from Ebay for about US$70 (which includes shipping). I know this since I’m actively trying to procure some at this time (not because I think the world is about to end, but rather for outdoor camping purposes).

Finally, I wonder why he isn’t marketing the most obvious of survivalist gear – guns and ammo.

I am also painfully aware that by writing about him, I am bringing attention to what he’s doing, which can only help him. I have no problem with that, mainly because what he’s returning to me is the chance to analyze whether what he is doing will work or not. Better to learn from other people’s mistakes than your own!

Just reading some testimony from people that survived the great depression tells us that we have a long way to go before we get to this point.

We always had sufficient food. Meager-type food. It wasn’t the best food. We would maybe get some kind of meat, maybe neck bones or something like that. My mother would cook them, my father would eat the neck bones, and we’d eat what now would be thrown away: the greases off the neck bones, that is what we would eat, heat it up and pour it on in a plate, get some bread, and sop that, and we thought we were living good. We were happy with that.

The last time I checked the local supermarket, good choice of cuts were still available at prices that wouldn’t destroy my bank account, at least right now.

Despite the fact that our governments are doing almost everything they can to destroy as much public wealth as possible, enough wealth has been created since the Great Depression to prevent us from getting back to that era.

President Calvin Coolidge’s autobiography – this is a large document, about 15 megabytes. However, it is well worth the read – it contains some fairly interesting insight on the inner workings of early 20th century American government.

I received this gem of a letter in the mail a couple weeks ago. I had to scan it just so I can share it with you:

If you can’t read the graphic, essentially it’s an invoice (unsolicited) for CAD$1330 for the service of these guys putting your trademark name on some internet site somewhere. Never mind the fact that the Canadian government does the same thing when you file for a trademark application.

Now while there is nothing illegal about this letter (it clearly states that all it will do is publish your trademark on some site that nobody will ever look through), they do make the mistake of leaving their bank account information on the letter, just in case if you were insane enough to wire some money to these people.

They do leave their account details in the letter, however.

The Bank of Nova Scotia
625 Cochrane Drive, Markham Ontario, L3R 9R9
Branch/Transit: 77842
SWIFT: NOSCCATT
Account Name: Trademark Info Corp
Account Number: 77842 00411 14

These guys also operate out of Vancouver, as evidenced by their Cambie Street PO Box (3495 Cambie, PO Box 405). If these guys piss off the wrong people, I can easily see whoever ends up checking the mail should fear for their physical security. It’s not terribly difficult to station yourself outside the boxes and wait for somebody to check box 405 to see if anybody was stupid enough to write them a check.

I went outside for a couple hours in the snow. I bundled up two layers of clothing and made sure the interface to my boots and my skin wasn’t easily accessible.

Not too many people were walking outside.

I walked to the local river where duckies were playing in the water.

Merry Christmas everybody!

I think this news story is a little more significant than it is presented – Google is turning into “yet another company”.

When this happens you are going to lose the most valuable asset – smart people. The smart ones will realize this conversion is happening (if they haven’t already) and then get out of town. I personally know one person who did this (who is likely reading this post already).

Google’s march to mediocrity will be followed by the same march that companies like Microsoft took – when the MBA’s and middle managers take over from the visionaries, you see exactly what is happening at Google – the slow erosion of what made Google great into a company designed to harvest as much cash as possible from the work it did years ago.

The discussion about “saving cash” and “cost cutting” at Google is a rather spurious argument since they have about $15 billion in cash on their balance sheet, zero debt, and the past 12 months they made an after-tax income of about $5 billion. So if they decided to give their employees a thousand dollar cash bonus, it would cost them about 13 million dollars in after-tax money. It’s likely that the morale gain would have far, far, far exceeded the cash savings of the decision they did make to give everybody a mobile phone.

Canada released the October Fiscal Monitor, the monthly progress report of Canada’s financial statements.

Revenues are up a shade due to higher personal income tax collections, offset by significantly lower corporate income taxes and GST collections (the latter two were affected by lower corporate profits and the corporate tax cut, and also the GST cut).

When one does the math, the GST number is interesting – if the GST had not been cut to 5%, GST collections would have been $18,516 million for April to October 2008. In 2007 this was $18,088 million. This assumes that the GST cut did not affect people’s spending decisions.

This is an increase of 2.4% year-to-year of taxable spending by consumers.

The government is still drinking in the punch bowl when it comes to expenditures – program expenses are up from 108.1 billion to 115.9 billion, a 7.2% increase year-to-year. The Conservative government has been anything but fiscally conservative in their administration to date.

Microsoft Office 2007 (aka Office Vista) has a new interface – the “Ribbon”. You will recognize it:

Unfortunately when trying to force myself to learn it, it is nearly impossible to obtain a “memory” from it. And I have been using different types of software for a long, long time.

Good user interface design is tricky – and Microsoft blew it with the ribbon. I am absolutely sure that somebody learning Office from scratch will find the system to be manageable, but I am finding it very difficult to use it with the speed that I could use the old version with. So this is why I am anticipating I will be having Office 2003 on my system for a very long time.

Unfortunately, other than that, the new office is quite well polished – I especially like the “dynamic preview” of font color/size changes, and some other features, but the ribbon just adds extra overhead to manipulating documents that I don’t want to incur.

Anytime there is a change in the user interface, the big cost is the time of training. This one forces the user to take a big hit. At least when going from XP to Vista, the only hit you had to make was just waiting for the thing to load up. With Office 2007, you’ve got to spend brainpower trying to find the icon on the ribbon that does what you want it to do.

I think the root cause of all of this is that Microsoft has been very aware that Apple has come back into the marketplace, and they took some strategic direction to turn themselves into another Apple with respect to their user interfaces. This alienates their traditional user base, which is awfully used to much more “blocky” and “geeky” interfaces than the “curvy” and “graphical” interfaces that Apple sells to people.

Posting will be very light between now and the New Year. Have a good holiday break, try not to gain too much weight!

Update: Very light? Maybe not. We’ll see.