Double Blind

My by-election predictions were horrible. It was the result of five minutes of research that I came up with them, so clearly next time some more effort is required, such as discovering a certain former North Winnipeg MLA, which just might affect the election results…

I did look at the Manitoba polling provincially, and while the current NDP government (which faces a likely election in 2011) is not as popular as the previous premier under former premier Gary Doer, they are still polling neck and neck against the Progressive Conservative opposition. This factored into my fairly pro-NDP bias, in addition to the previous results.

Predicted (Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette): Conservative victory by a mile [subsequent comment of "by 10-15% over the NDP"];

Actual: Conservatives won it by a mile, about a 30% margin over the NDP. Obviously I thought this would have been tighter than it actually was.

Score: 0.5 points for getting the result, but not spread correct.

Predicted (Vaughan): Conservative victory by 5-10% over the Liberals;

Actual: Conservatives won by 2.5%. Tighter than I was projecting.

Score: 0.5 points for getting the results, but not the spread correct.

Predicted (Winnipeg North): NDP victory by a mile.

Actual: Liberals won by 5%. Few saw this result coming.

Score: 0 points for not getting the result, and worse yet, not getting the spread at all correct.

Total Score: 1/3, or pretty pathetic!

In terms of national significance, despite all the spin artists saying this will be the demise of the NDP and/or the rise of the Conservatives, I do not think what we have seen is electorally significant. Notably there was about 30% turnout in each of the ridings, so in a general election, things will be volatile in Vaughn and Winnipeg North.

The US Department of Homeland Security took over about 75 domain names mainly dealing with piracy – counterfeit materials and torrents.

It is just a matter of time before they will start hauling down sites because of content not relating to piracy. My next guess would be pornography or racial-hatred sites will be next on the chopping block.

Suffice to say, this will reduce the integrity of the .com domain space, mainly the right to allow the domain to point to whatever nameservers you want to (and thus allowing you to connect the domain name to a server on an IP address of your choice).

No surprises here… this post is written over a week in advance of the by-elections, but barring any surprising news from the national scene, or any sizzling revelations on any of the candidates, here are the predicted results:

Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette: Conservative victory by a mile;

Vaughan: Conservative victory by 5-10% over the Liberals;

Winnipeg North: NDP victory by a mile.

I find this “free coffee, any size, any time” promotion by McDonalds to be commercially interesting. What are they doing?

Are they getting customers addicted to caffeine?

Are they trying to put Starbucks and Tim Hortons on economically competitive notice?

Or did they look at the statistics from their previous promotion of free coffee (which was only given in the mornings, and in a small size) and actually determine that people buy other stuff with their free coffee, well beyond the marginal costs of serving such coffee?

This continual promotion of free coffee at Mcdonalds has been a very fascinating marketing approach, and I would be very curious to know what kind of data they gleaned out of this study.

(Link: Chilliwack Times)

Metro Porter is offering a bus service that goes from Chilliwack to downtown Abbotsford and Metrotown, leaving Chilliwack at 9:00am and leaving Metrotown at 6:00pm. They are pricing the service with a $25 round trip and offering the service Friday, Saturday and Sunday up until the day before Christmas Eve.

It will be interesting to see whether this service gains traction or not – it will be faster than any light-rail service and much cheaper in terms of capital requirements. Strictly in terms of fuel costs, a round trip from Chilliwack to Metrotown would consume about 15-16 litres of gasoline in a passenger car, assuming 12km/L.