Double Blind

Two years, the incandescent light bulb was viewed as the great Satan of power consumption – inefficient and costly. There were announcements that the government would move legislation to ban the sale of incandescent bulbs by 2012, but thankfully this never materialized. I cannot find any hard-coding of federal regulations governing this issue, just a bunch of press releases stating they will change the regulations. I can’t find evidence of any change of regulations that has occurred – usually there is some sort of release that happens after enactment.

Enacting regulations or legislation to mandate alternatives for environmental reasons is not ideal simply because such legislation or regulations have true costs that are usually downplayed at the time of enactment.

For example, the implied proposed alternative, compact fluorescent light (CFL), requires a small amount of mercury within the bulb to operate. As the result of a breakage (or two), one could inadvertently expose themselves to mercury vapours, which would be much more damaging than the energy savings of using incandescent bulbs. In addition, the type of light emitted from CFL bulbs is generally deemed to be inferior than the light produced by the incandescent – the typical phrase is that “it feels like a hospital in my home” is used.

There is now another example of how being energy conscious incurs its own set of costs – traffic lights. Traffic lights traditionally have been operated with multiple incandescent bulbs. The new type of lights have light emitting diodes (LEDs) which are incredibly efficient and have a much better light-up and light-down time. While they cost more to build and construct, they are much cheaper to maintain simply because the half-life of a typical LED can be measured in decades (for example, my flashlight LED promised a half-life of 14 years of continuous use).

There was one hidden consequence, however. Because of their incredible efficiency, they emit less heat. As a result, in cold-climate jurisdictions, traffic lights would be blocked with small sheets of ice, while with conventional traffic lights they would be melted by the heat emitted from the bulbs. I am not sure whether this can be corrected by future designs, but it seems that having city workers manually scrape off the ice from traffic lights would end up being a more costly solution than the amount of energy savings realized by using LEDs. This might be offset by the lowered labour requirements of not having to replace traffic light bulbs. I hope there is a cost-effective solution to this problem.

On a side note, LED flashlights are wonderful. I’ve been an early adopter of LED flashlights since they offer so much more light than conventional flashlights. My most recent purchase was a US$30 triple-colour flashlight from Walmart and playing with the blue and red LEDs and shining them on things is a heck of a lot of fun.

… and it should be noted for the public record that Wind Mobile’s shopping website is down, presumably due to intense curiousity. This will bode well for them, to have this much latent demand.

While Wind is not yet in Vancouver, they will be coming to the area in early 2010. I hope this includes the entire Fraser Valley.

Their key competitive plank is not in their voice plans, but rather their data plans – basically $35/month gets you “infinite” data for your mobile device, while $55/month gets you “infinite” data on a USB stick for a notebook. This will introduce some significant price pressure on the other majors (Telus, Bell, Rogers) to lower their prices.

One interesting aspect of their “infinite” feature is that they define infinite as 5 gigabytes, but they will lower your bandwidth prioritization if you go over this limit. This is a very smart way to be offering data service. I do not know if other bandwidth providers (mobile or not) do the same, but this is a much better way than just arbitrarily cutting it off at a certain level of bandwidth consumption. While electric power lines must be able to give you power at 120 volts, and 60 cycles a second, bandwidth requirements do not have to be as precise, unless if your intention is playing streaming video.

I know I have no interest in getting a Blackberry or a mobile internet device, but the mobile internet USB stick for the notebook is an interesting concept – I am guessing if I took my little Asus netbook around to places that don’t normally offer wireless internet (e.g. if you’re not around Starbucks) then it would enable you to transform any workspace, indoors or outdoors, into an office. In the summer, you could conceivably take your netbook outdoors and just do “work” in some remote area that has wireless coverage. That’s the logical application of a USB internet stick, but I am sure others have more creative ways of using it.

I remember the first time I saw wireless internet, it was at a friend’s place, and I thought “Oh my, this makes laptops so much more useful!” and within about half a year, I had a notebook and wireless internet – back in the days where you had to buy a separate PCMCIA card to get wireless into your computer. It was absolutely wonderful. I don’t get quite the same vibe with the mobile internet USB stick, but I can easily see how others would see it as a “killer app” that would make netbooks a lot more useful than they are.

I am likely in the lower 10th percentile in terms of adopting mobile technology in my age group. I love the internet, but I don’t want it available at my fingertips.

Apparently Facebook changed their privacy system in such a way that changed to “recommended” settings which would end up exposing information in people’s profiles to the public unless if they knew exactly what they were doing when adjusting the more ‘granular’ settings.

Facebook’s mission is primarily to act as a mechanism to collect information for advertisers so they can deliver targeted ads more effectively to you and people of your social cohort. People voluntarily give their information away, in exchange for the price of allowing Facebook to be able to make such associations.

Compared to my training report just three days back, I am consistently mystified by my energy levels on the treadmill, which seems to be random. I basically got up from an afternoon nap and headed to the gym, and felt kind of tired. However, once on the treadmill, I proceeded to blaze through 24 minutes of running (3 minutes run, 1 minute walk, repeated 8 times) before calling it a session, without any leg issues or cardio issues. This is part of my “refresh” cycle before I continue on.

At Superstore they are selling 4kg bags of Rogers granulated sugar for $3.98 (limit 1; excess was $4.98). Since I was rather low on supply, I picked up a bag. Even when purchased in bulk amounts it isn’t this cheap per unit mass – the last I checked at Costco, 10kg of sugar was about $12.

During World War 2, the United Kingdom had to ration their food supply because before the war, a great deal of their food sources were imported. The allocation of sugar at the end of World War 2 was half a pound per person per week.

Thus, the 4kg bag that I purchased would have represented about a 4 month supply of sugar.

The Minister of Industry has overturned the CRTC’s previous ruling on Globalive (doing business under the name “Wind Mobile“), opening the mobile market in a large area in Canada. The overruling was not one per se; they technically granted a variance, but the net effect is the same as if the CRTC had ruled in Globalive’s favour from the beginning (minus the one month delay).

While I disagree with the principle of the executive order, I welcome the fact that there is a high degree of probability that mobile phone packages will get materially cheaper as the major telecoms start to face increased competition (through Wind, DAVE, and Public).

I have never had a need or an urge to use mobile data on a cell phone device; I have primarily been a voice user. Hopefully I can realize some cost savings on this front sometime in 2010. This is the first time since the days of ClearNet and Fido (before they got taken over by Rogers) we will be seeing some real competition in the wireless market.

I also welcome the decision simply because Fido, Rogers, Bell and Telus have been shrinking their local calling areas – nothing would please them more to consider every call a “long distance” call, even though the true principle of “long distance” has not existed in telecommunications for a good twenty years. The concept of “phone numbers” is also out-dated, but I don’t think it will be replaced anytime soon.

I couldn’t help but think about Vancouver when reading this article about a couple purchasing a 175 sqft apartment in Manhattan for… US$150,000. That’s about US$860 per square foot. In Yaletown, you see some 1 bedroom apartments 500-600 square feet south of Pacific Blvd selling for about $425,000, so the cost isn’t that much higher than Manhattan.

What got me was the following:

The couple will pay off their mortgage in two years, when they plan to remodel some of the apartment, adding a Murphy bed and larger windows. They will then be saddled only with their maintenance fee, which is just over $700 a month.

$700/month maintenance is insanely high – even the highest of those $425,000 Yaletown condominiums don’t have maintenance fees much above $250/mo.

It is a lifestyle decision – basically with a place that small, you can’t really get any work done at home, and will be spending a lot of time outside. In a place like Manhattan, that can be easily done, but it makes me wonder how far they will be pushing the space boundaries in Vancouver in the name of “affordability”.

One positive aspect of having a place so small is that it really forces you to get rid of all of your accumulated junk.

For the first two months in the USA’s fiscal year 2010 (October and November), they have managed to rack up a projected $292 billion deficit. This was $11 billion more than forecast. If they continue at this rate, it will be a $1.752 trillion deficit for the fiscal year. That’s $1,752,000,000,000 for those that actually want to see all the zeros.

This is a mind-boggling amount of money. It’s a sufficiently high number that it becomes incomprehensible. One way to conceptualize the number is that if you gave every person on the planet (an estimated 6.7 billion people) an even share of the projected US budget deficit, you would be giving them $261.49 each. Or if you just spread the deficit to US residents (308 million) that would be US$5,688 per American.

This makes Canada’s projected budget deficit (CAD$57 billion, or roughly $1,676 per Canadian) look like small beans by comparison.

The laws of economics suggests that this will last as long as institutions’ willingness to lend governments money at low interest rates.

I didn’t write about Week 5′s training – it scaled up to a start of 3 minutes of running and one minute of walking repeated 9 times for a total of 27 minutes of running volume. I thought transitioning to this would be rather difficult, but all three training sessions for the week went extraordinarily well – I didn’t feel any cardiovascular pressure nor did I feel any pressure on my calves or feet. It was actually the most smoothest training I had yet this year.

Today was a little different – I started week 6′s training which was a scheduled 5 minute run, 1 minute walk, repeated 7 times for a total volume of 35 minutes of running. Due to some rather bad timing, I got to the gym rather late. I wasn’t going to run outside since it is below freezing at the moment (and even worse when factoring in wind chill). So I managed to get 21 minutes of running in, at a 3 minute run and 1 minute walk interval. I also felt out of energy during the training, and my right calf was not hurting, but it definitely felt sore. It just wasn’t my day, so I will be calling this week a “recovery week” and run an abbreviated schedule similar to Week 5 before moving onto the “real” week 6. I figure this will maintain my fitness and better prepare me for the next week.

Fortunately I am starting the training program so early that I can afford to take a few weeks like this and slowly scale up my running.

I am also mystified how my energy levels can change so radically between training sessions – last Friday I was done the 24 minutes of running and felt like I could have done the whole 10 kilometers right there and then. Today, I ended 21 minutes feeling like that I was running up a 15 degree inclined hill. I guess the whole point at this stage still is to get your heart rate well above 130 beats per minute (mine was at around 160) and keep it there for as long as possible, and to get your leg muscles in shape for running.

I have posted on Divestor an article of “What makes Vancouver Real Estate so expensive?“. I’m sure there are some holes in my analysis, but it was interesting to write it up and go through some variables of my mental modeling of the real estate market.

One of the reasons why it is so expensive is that people don’t translate dollars into yearly income – if you gave me a stack of money today, I could translate every dollar into an income stream of 10 cents a year with a reasonable amount of risk. So when looking at your typical Greater Vancouver detached home of $749,808, one is actually giving up a future income stream of $74,981/year to purchase that home. Assuming you don’t make any other money, that would be $58,500 after taxes in 2010. If one were to rent a place for half that amount (about $2,400) and continue investing the rest of it at 10%, there is a high degree of probability that you would be up even after factoring in missed capital gains on a home purchase.