Double Blind

I noticed on the Pundits’ Guide that when writing about the coverage on the court case dealing with the “in-and-out” case regarding Conservative election expenses in 2006, she mentioned the following:

If you haven’t explored Twitter before, just click on this link: http://twitter.com/CPCvsElxCan, and then scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on the “More” button. Keep repeating until you get to his first post (or “tweet” as they’re called), and then read upwards to get the detail in chronological order. The hearings have been on for two days already, and continue tomorrow morning. To follow them live, visit the same page, and reload it periodically.

This is the future of journalism, and if you’ve ever found yourself complaining about the lack of detail or substance in mainstream media coverage of a story you care about, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Glen does a lot within the 140-character limit each “tweet” is confined to.

I am rather interested in the proceedings of this case, but I found reading it via Twitter was nearly impossible. It reminds me of those websites that take long articles and split them up into 10 sections that you have to click on “next” to read the next paragraph (which is designed that way on purpose to maximize page hits and presumably advertising revenues).

I guess I am just getting too old fashioned on the internet, requiring paragraphs to assimilate information properly. If Twitter is indeed the future of disseminating information, I guess I am about to soon be a dinosaur.

Another example of risk intolerance – the background to this story is that the only ferry (of size) servicing the BC Northern Coast was the Queen of the North, which sank in a 2006 accident for reasons not entirely clear to this day (other than the obvious statement that the crew was not following navigational practices).

Once the ferry sank, BC Ferries had to get a quick replacement. There were no ferries that could service the north coast, and the Prince Rupert to Skidegate (Queen Charlotte Islands) route did not get vehicle service for a significant period of time. So they searched and found the Northern Adventure, which was being operated from Europe. It was “good enough” and the decision was likely made to get something running in the northern part of the province, as opposed to tendering for construction for a ship and getting it three years later.

Fast forward a couple years, we have it becoming a political issue. From CKNW:

NDP Ferries critic Gary Coons says the Northern Adventure was built for the Mediterranean, not BC’s rough northern waters, “This ferry has had a litany of concerns right from the very beginning when it was known as the “Vomit Comet” and right through to sending it out on the waters when it shouldn’t be out there. So I would hope that people making decisions ensure that the weather conditions are safe enough.”

BC Ferries bought the former MV Sonia for about 50 million dollars in 2007 to replace the sunken Queen of the North.

So if BC Ferries would have tendered for a “perfect ship”, I bet you Coons would still be complaining that there isn’t any real ferry service up north because it would have been delivered sometime in 2010.

I have been seeing a statistic saying there are roughly 300,000 homeless people in Canada, and therefore, there should be some call to action. The argument then goes on as if this fact was true and proven.

If 300,000 Canadians are homeless, I am surprised we haven’t seen an armed revolution.

Canada consists of approximately 34 million people. 300,000 homeless people would be one in every 110 persons. The metropolitan Vancouver area (GVRD) has about 2.1 million people, as of the 2006 census. Assuming the homeless are spread evenly across the country (this in itself is not a valid assumption – the highest concentration of homeless people are in low per-capital income areas such as Main and East Hastings in Vancouver), it would imply that about 19,100 people are homeless – about the population of White Rock.

I will call BS on the 300,000 number. My estimation, given the sketchy data available, would be a factor of 10 less than that. Still, this is no reason to not address the issue, but when proponents of homeless housing make up statistics and increase the magnitude by ridiculous amounts, it really undermines their case. This is very similar to the approach that global warming proponents have taken – saying global warming will destroy the planet six times over, etc.

I frequently find myself agreeing with what Bernard writes, but he has a sufficiently different angle on most issues that he is well worth reading (rather than an ‘echo chamber’ effect that can result in reading too much stuff that one agrees with).

His last post, there are no absolutes out there, is rather thought provoking. Finland had no choice in the second world war other than to ally with Germany – Germany had already taken effective control of Norway and Sweden (Sweden being “neutral”), and the USSR was much more of a threat. They managed to get away with their own existence, but at a cost of some rather valuable land on the southeastern part of the country. In this respect, their policy decision regarding who to back during World War 2 turned out to be very risky, but correct in retrospect – it is not certain by any means that backing the USSR during World War 2 would have left them in a position to operate autonomously (compared to the other satellite states of the USSR in Eastern Europe after WW2 ended).

Bernard asks whether backing a government in Afghanistan, a government that by no means is perfect or even good, but at least not evil, is worth it. This is a good moral argument – is the ideals of democracy worth intervening in a foreign land, with attached costs such as loss of life, and higher taxes for people domestically (in the form of military spending?). Will going into Afghanistan and propping up their government cost us more than if we left and let them revert back to the Taliban (which will seem to be inevitable if the west did leave)?

I think the basic public equation here deals with the tolerance of risk – western society these days seems to be less and less accepting of risk-taking. I have written about this as early as February 2004 in one of my first posts on this site. We expect perfect execution, perfect hindsight and perfect operations once decisions are made. The only problem with this is that perfect decision-making is impossible unless if you have hindsight – and this never happens. Staying in Afghanistan is obviously a risky decision, but when is there payoff, and if so, how will it be realized? What if by staying in there, we avert a major terrorist attack in Canada 10 years from now?

Assessing the impact of decisions by measuring what does not happen in the future is very, very difficult fortune telling. But it is these sorts of decisions that make it very difficult to politically explain to people, which is why our elected officials very rarely spend political capital on a payout that cannot result in some positive outcome.

Good decision-makers are ones that can identify risks far in advance, and defuse them before it becomes excessively risky to do so. One of my favourite US Presidents is Calvin Coolidge, for this reason – I suspect he was very good at defusing adverse situations before they became major issues. As a result, he was panned by historians as having a relatively “boring” presidency (and his aloof personality did not help matters), but the US during his administration prospered greatly (although critics will point out the Great Depression start shortly after his administration ended). You can read Coolidge’s autobiography linked to my post here.

Week 4 is one of the so-called “easy recovery weeks”, which scales down slightly the amount of running that has to be performed. It is designed to put less pressure on your body, but I personally don’t notice much difference. Week 4 is also the last week where you are supposed to take 2 minute walks between running periods. After this, it gets a lot more difficult – the most difficult transition is going from 2 minute walks to 1 minute walks between running cycles.

Today, I paid careful attention to what Declan posted in the comments on the previous week. Although it is very difficult to self-assess (I will be doing a video of myself running on the new iPod Nano soon), I measured how fast my running was in terms of paces per minute. The video said that 180 steps per minute is the “sweet spot” for running, so I counted steps for 15 seconds on the treadmill (when going at 6.8 miles per hour) and oddly enough, it was close – about 46 paces over 15 seconds, which translates into 184 steps per minute.

Now my timing was not that precise, but when repeating the counts over and over again, my running frequency is every so slightly higher than what the recommendation was, so I will attempt to slow down my frequency (and subsequently this would imply a larger stride).

I know one of my big energy-wasting issues deals with balance and I have also been a lot more conscious as to where my feet strike the floor in relation to the rest of my body (it should be directly underneath the center of gravity and not in front of your body). Quite frankly it didn’t feel a heck of a lot different than my normal stride, but I think once I see some video footage of myself running, I will be able to diagnose whether I am swaying left-to-right too much, and also where my feet are striking the ground with respect to my body.

Finally, I also notice that I am running into an issue which I had encountered in my previous runs in previous years, shin splints. I need to also be rather conscious with respect to my stride and make sure that this won’t kill my running ‘career’. Historically, whenever I have felt the tingling of nerves on the bottom of my legs (which I have encountered in each and every Sun Run I have been in after roughly the 6km mark), it has not impaired my performance, but all the reading suggests that I am doing genuine injury to myself by continuing to run with them. The nerve tingling always goes away after walking for about 5 minutes after the fact.

The Ministry of Finance released a draft code of conduct for credit and debit card issuers. There are nine bullet points to this bulletin, most of which are favourable to the merchant, and deservingly so – merchants pay a ton of credit card and interchange fees which inevitably get passed onto the consumers. These fees are not seen by the customer except in the form of embedded higher prices – merchants have to raise prices to cover the costs of credit card transactions.

Most complaints from merchants deal with these fees – for example, if you are a generic retail store, your typical cost for a credit card transaction is 30 cents plus 2.5% of the sale price. In an industry where margins are quite low, this is a crippling cost to incur – if your gross profit is 10%, typically you are throwing away 25% of your profits if your customers use credit cards to pay. Gasoline sales, for example, have a huge fraction of the retail margin taken away with credit card fees. This is somewhat offset by the fact that people that used credit cards tend to spend more, and you don’t have to worry about cash collection, but the cost is a significant decline in profit margin.

While this code of conduct proposal will do nothing to regulate fees (which is what the merchants have been calling for), it has a provision that is almost as good:

5. Merchants will be allowed to provide discounts for different methods of payment (e.g. cash, debit card, credit card). Merchants will also be allowed to provide differential discounts among different brands.

Discounts will be allowed for any payment method. As well, differential discounting will be permitted between payment methods and brands. The advertised price must be available for all payment methods. Any discounts must be clearly marked at the point-of-sale.

Most (if not all) credit card merchant agreements have a provision that disallow cash discounting – the ’sticker’ price cannot be decreased for an alternative method of payment. Companies like Canada Tire can give away “Canadian Tire Money” or some other store credit, but this is because the amount paid is still the same compared to if you had paid for it with a credit card.

With cash discounting, merchants that are sufficiently angered enough about credit card fees could conceivably advertise cash-based prices that are 2% under the ‘regular’ price. So if you go to some store and see an item for $100 that you would like to buy, there could be a sticker underneath saying: pay cash for $98.

It will be interesting to see how credit card companies will react to this.

Just as an aside, Interac (Debit) payments are much cheaper than credit cards for merchants – usually around 30 cents a pop, without a percentage fee charged. You can see why there is a big fight brewing on Mastercard and Visa getting into the debit card space – they will want to take over the payment network and eventually be able to charge credit card-like fees for debit transactions. Of course, you should never use debit cards since you have absolutely no legal recourse when your account and PIN get compromised and you see a huge hole in your account balance.

You heard it here first…

Hillary Clinton vs. Sarah Palin.

Probably the two most polarizing figures in American politics today going against each other.

I have decided to split off my finance and economics-related posts to Divestor. The reasoning was that I think the financial-related matters have been distracting from the main purpose of this site, which has always intended to deal with more quirky and anecdotal commentaries.

Political commentary that does not directly deal with financial or economic matters will still be here.

I am somewhat concerned that there are three domains that I am maintaining – DoubleBlind.ca, Divestor.com and SachaPeter.ca (which is reserved for Cultus Lake Park Board-related business), but I think partitioning them in this way makes logical sense. If not, I will consolidate everything later – Wordpress has a fairly good export/import function.

A couple weeks ago the CRTC shot down Wind Mobile because it was not Canadian-controlled. There is a requirement for telecommunication firms to have Canadian ownership and control. The specific requirements are the following:

(a) not less than eighty per cent of the members of the board of directors of the corporation are individual Canadians;

(b) Canadians beneficially own, directly or indirectly, in the aggregate and otherwise than by way of security only, not less than eighty per cent of the corporation’s voting shares issued and outstanding; and

(c) the corporation is not otherwise controlled by persons that are not Canadians.

It is provision (c) that Wind Mobile’s operating company, Globalive Wireless Management Corp., was violating. When reading the full CRTC decision (which is interesting in its own right, but you really have to have your full brain switched on to correctly interpret the ruling), it is quite evident that Canadians do not have control over the corporation.

As such, the CRTC made the correct decision in interpreting the legislation and regulations that apply in this scenario.

That said, Telus, Bell and Rogers have been shamelessly spending some big dollars in their public relations spin machines to try to get the Minister of Industry to not order a review of this decision (or a change in regulations) that would otherwise nullify the decision. As much as it pains me to agree with something that won’t introduce more competition in the wireless market in Canada, the legislation is there for a fairly good reason and I would not change it. Globalive and Wind Mobile will have to play by the existing rules here in Canada – changing the rules sets a very bad precedent since you will have every other player out there looking at investing in Canada and decide that the regulatory climate is too unstable and take their money elsewhere.

The reason why you have a flood of wireless investors in the country is because it is perfectly evident that there is a huge market for wireless data services in the country. Also celebrating the CRTC decision undoubtedly are DAVE Wireless and Public Mobile, both of whom will get into the marketplace in 2010, and whom presumably have no issues with the rules concerning Canadian ownership and control.

The next time I go to Ottawa, I will be sure to see if I could try out some seal meat at the parliamentary restaurant.

My guess is that it will taste too blubbery, but I want to see first-hand. Maybe the skill is in the preparation, but most skilled chefs know how to let foods’ natural flavours stand out for themselves.

I once had turtle meat at the Cayman Islands, and parts of it were so fatty it was like eating jello-ified meat. I wouldn’t be surprised if I got a year’s dose of heavy metals in the process.