Double Blind

Just listening to CKNW and they interviewed a First Nations Band chief with respect to how wild salmon stocks appear to be dwindling. He stated that fish farms are a contributing factor – sea lice causing degradation of wild stocks.

I have not taken much time to educate myself on the complexities of maintaining a sustainable fishery, but my intuition suggests that the people that are paid to do so (the federal Ministry of Fisheries, aka Department of Fisheries and Oceans) aren’t much better at it either.

How about the suggestion that fishing is the cause of declining wild salmon stocks?

It appears that every commercially harvested biological stocks are all doomed to collapse. The only reason why the collapse in the wild salmon industry has not made the media headlines is simply because the commercial fishing industry in BC is not a huge industry relative to the rest of the economy. This is compared to Newfoundland and Labrador’s collapse of the cod fishery, which took out most of the province’s economy and decimated many of its towns which were wholly dependent on fishing. The evidence of the collapse of Newfoundland’s fishing industry is still quite evident twenty years later when I traveled there last July.

Apparently the geniuses up at Twitter have decided to try to monetize their traffic by introducing “promoted tweets”, essentially pay-for-advertising to get on the screens of users.

Let’s just say I will be shocked to find anybody that voluntarily would want these to show up on their computer screens.

Apparently these will only be linked to search results, but I wonder when people’s own Twitter profiles will get spammed with Twitter crap and become spammified to the point where the signal to noise ratio goes to zero.

Twitter basically has the problem of being a service that a bunch of people use, but there is no good model to monetizing what they are offering without treading onto Google’s turf (and you will get killed if you try this). One way or another, the economic analysis highly suggests they will be a vassal of Google.

I still have no idea how people find Twitter useful. I’ve tried, and tried, but still think its value, at best, is very limited.

Five Guys Burgers (a franchise I have never heard of before) makes their market niche concentrating on what they do well, mainly selling quality burgers and fries.

To be able to compete against the likes of McDonalds and Burger King is an interesting study in terms of how to beat the big chains. The closest one to Chilliwack is near Ambleside Park in North Vancouver. There is also another one in Bellingham which is technically closer, but requires the border crossing where you are guaranteed to be arrested for declaring you want to get into America to eat burgers.

The “Walter Cronkite” and “Dan Rather” era is over. Probably the peak of “conventional news media” was when Richard Nixon was forced to resign in the Watergate scandal. Dan Rather destroyed any credibility he had with the “Rathergate” scandal in the lead-up to the 2004 US Presidential Election.

It is with this wonderment that I am amazed how much local press has been generated (CKNW, Harvey Oberfeld, Alex Tsakumis, etc.) on whether Tony Parsons is anchoring CBC, CHEK-Victoria, Global, or whatever. For people of my generation (and younger), I do not think it makes any difference whatsoever. It might for those that are older and still think that conventional news media is relevant and credible beyond a source of entertainment.

I remember about 10 or 15 years ago when I paid active attention to the sports pages that there was a big ruckus that Tony Gallagher moved from some other media to the Vancouver Province. It actually made it into the television sports broadcast on BCTV. To this day, I still don’t have any clue why the heck it received as much press as it did – obviously in retrospect, I guess there was some internal politics going on in the media world. But the world outside the media world probably just didn’t give a crap.

I suspect this is likely the case with Tony Parsons.

When I was young, I do remember him being the guy on the 6pm news on BCTV, but today it doesn’t matter what face is delivering the news – I don’t watch too much news on television anymore. It’s just so much easier to go to Google News and read instead of listening.

The rule of the day is when things are boring, present things out of context.

On the Drudge Report today, we have a picture of Barack Obama pointing his finger at Stephen Harper:

Body language says a lot, and this is a fairly powerful picture.

However, when flicking through the entire set of pictures, we have the following:

Makes you wonder what happened, whether it was actually a “snub” as the Drudge Report is implying. Harper’s smart enough to know that despite whatever you might think of the President of the USA (whether his name is George W. Bush or Barack Obama), you never do anything to piss off your trading partner that consists of 75% of your export economy.

If I were to take a guess, they exchanged words over the bet over the Olympic gold men’s hockey game, and Obama’s angry that he lost two cases of beer in a bet.

Media reporting in the 21st century is more about presenting an individual or group’s opinion, rather than presenting objective information, which can usually only be gleaned from source documents.

I had commented back on October 2009 about the proposed replacement of the BC Place roof:

My only comment is that I hope in the analysis they compared spending $458 million against the cost of demolishing BC Place and building a new stadium from scratch. It is a 26-year old facility which originally cost $126 million to build back in 1983; even though construction and material costs have increased since then, if you budget $750 million for a new stadium, it might have been a more attractive opportunity instead of spending $458 million on old infrastructure.

I am guessing no such analysis was performed beyond picking numbers that made the alternative scenario look as unattractive (costly) as possible. In the government press release contained the quote of “If the Province were to try and replace BC Place with a new facility today, it is estimated the cost would be in excess of $1 billion.”, although I doubt this number is true when one considers that BC Place was constructed for $126M in 1983 and GM Place was constructed for $160M of private money in 1995. Even if you quintupled the cost of BC Place to account for inflation over the 30 years, the option of spending $458M to give BC Place a new roof seems highly suspicious, especially when one considers that you don’t have to deal with land acquisition issues.

It increasingly looks like that a deal was struck between political insiders to use public money (via the crown corporation that operates BC Place and the lands around BC Place) under the guise of a development project. The question is – what risks do the crown corporation take in this project vs. the risks the developer is taking?

Of course, since the official opposition is inept when dealing with anything relating to economic matters, this will likely slide under the radar – the only thing getting media attention these days is the HST.

What I find highly ironic is that the BC government capital projects that have gone relatively on-budget were P3′s, which are the only capital projects that the NDP have given any opposition lip service to (mainly complaining they are “bad” because you have private sector involvement). The Sea-to-Sky expansion, the Bill Bennett Bridge in Kelowna, the Canada Line, have all been P3 projects, and all of them have gone relatively on-track. The Abbotsford Regional Hospital, Surrey Outpatient Facility, Victoria Royal Jubilee are all P3′s and are relatively on budget. The Port Mann project is at $3.319 billion and we will see how that goes.

The two big screw-ups in costing have been the Vancouver Convention Centre (planned: $331 million; actual: $841 million), and this upcoming BC place project (planned: $365 million; current plan: $563 million and rising!).

One can argue that the BC Place project is a P3 because it is in conjunction with private developers, but I’ll leave the semantics for a future argument. Either way, these two downtown development capital projects are making the fast ferries look like pocket change by comparison (the fast ferries were budgeted for $210 million and ended up costing $460 million).

After the demise of the Starbucks Duetto card, I wrote the following:

I have since start shopping around for another credit card, and have attempted to apply for MBNA’s card which gives you 3% off on gasoline and groceries, and 1% off on everything else, in $50 increments. Assuming this is approved, I am guessing that it will amount to a substantially higher cash savings than with the Starbucks card.

About two weeks after I used the online application, MBNA sent me a functioning card with a ridiculously high credit limit. It offers the same fringe benefits as the previous VISA card (mainly the 1 year warranty extension and the “if your rental car gets ripped off you can claim up to $1,000 in expenses” protection), but the cashback bonus on groceries, gasoline and everything else will amount to a few pizzas over the course of a year.

On gasoline alone, I spent about $2,000 in 2009, so getting a 3% refund on the amount would be a $60 rebate. $60 buys a lot at the grocery store!

Once Royal Bank sends me their new card with some RBC points loaded onto it, I will be cashing those out immediately and putting the card away and likely never using it ever again.

This is cross-posted to BC2013.

The provincial government has certainly botched up a lot of policy lately (including how they executed the HST implementation), but one thing they have gotten correct is keeping a very staunch policy on not raising the minimum wage.

The appropriate law is the Employment Standards Act legislation, section 16. The actual wage is prescribed in regulation, part 4.

Currently in BC it is $8/hour, and $6/hour for a “training” wage (for people that have not worked 500 hours).

There are two main reasons for my argument and they are very well known arguments:

1) More jobs are available at lower wages. This should be obvious to everybody, even those that argue for an increase to the minimum wage. In society, everybody starts at a low wage, and when you acquire the necessary skills and experience at the workplace (such as showing up on time, learning how to follow processes and procedures, etc.) then you can advance up when you have demonstrated competency. My first job was a retail job as a teenager at minimum wage, and a lot of others got their start into the workforce this way.

2) Lower costs. There are a lot of industries out there that rely on minimum wage labour (fast food is the easiest example I can think of) and since labour forms the majority of costs for a lot of businesses, an increase in minimum wage would result in a consequential increase in costs.

In many, many, many cases, however, minimum wage is lower than the market value of labour, so over time, the BC minimum wage has decreased in relevancy because employers will pay more than the minimum wage to attract applicants.

Essentially the market has dictated in certain cases that they are not willing to be paid minimum wage for certain types of labour. As such, wages will go higher. This is a sign of a functioning labour market. It does not need an artificial increase to the floor wage.

A higher minimum wage policy (e.g. to $10/hour) will not kill the economy, but it will make things a bit more expensive for everybody where minimum wage labour is employed. This will disproportionately affect younger people, especially those trying to get a start into the labour market. I would suspect the social costs of a higher minimum wage are higher than the economic ones, although this is impossible to quantify.

The existing policy on minimum wages should not be changed.

I will take a shot at Jim Sinclair who stated in a Vancouver Sun article:

B.C.’s minimum wage should be immediately increased to at least $10 an hour, said Jim Sinclair, president of the B.C. Federation of Labour.

The reason why he is supportive of an increase in the minimum wage is because there are no unionized jobs given between $6 to $10/hour. Thus, shrinking the pool of non-unionized workers should give unions an incremental increase in power. Sinclair is speaking strictly out of self-interest to his union, as he should.

Even though the CRA only requires an income tax payment by April 30, 2010, I just zapped them some cash after finishing off my tax return. Interest rates are very low, so the money sitting in the bank collecting 2% is not worth the button clicking compared to getting the liability mentally out of my head.

When I tally up the amount of corporate income tax (paid through my wholly owned corporation), personal income tax, excise taxes (GST paid by the corporation to the government, and GST paid by myself personally on stuff I buy, import duties baked into the price of imported products I buy), provincial sales taxes (soon to be HST), gasoline taxes, carbon tax, liquor tax (not much), hotel room tax (a couple times), and my implied value of property and school taxes I pay in rent – I believe I am justified in saying I contribute my “fair share” of the total revenue contributions that the BC and Canadian governments receive.