“Light” Eggnog should be banned.
OK, maybe not banned, but people that buy it should get their heads checked. Eggnog is not going to have a good calorie to nutrition ratio, but when you get rid of all the fat, all you are left with is very, very sweet and watery milk. Proper Eggnog has plenty of fat to buffer the sweetness, which is why it is such a wonderful dessert-like drink.
It is less than two weeks for the the end of the year, and it is once again time to come up with some predictions for 2011, and to review the predictions of 2010. This post will be reviewing the predictions of 2010, which can you find here.
On with the predictions! Remember, at the time I made them (December 2009), I ranked them as (e) = easy, (m) = medium, and (h) = high in terms of risk.
The tally is as follows:
Success – 14
Partial Success – 2
Partial Failure – 2
Failure – 20
Unknown – 1
My general review of my own predictions is that I generally did a lame job in predicting 2010. The successes are largely “obvious”, while some of the failures were rather large (such as me thinking Gordon Campbell would survive 2010).
Politics
1. (e) Stephen Harper will be Prime Minister on December 31, 2010.
Success. Will recycle this prediction for 2011.
2. (m) Canadians will vote in a general federal election between July 1 to December 31, 2010.
Failure. You would have thought the Liberals would have been gunning for a September writ drop, and indeed even had Ignatieff give a relatively successful bus tour of the country (not counting the first day when it broke down!).
3. (e) The Green Party will still have zero elected seats (floor crossers excluded) in the Canadian House of Commons in December 2010.
Success. Will recycle this prediction for 2011. Consider this my long-standing “As long as Elizabeth May is leader of the Greens, they will win no seats” prediction.
4. (m) Election or no election, Justin Trudeau will mobilize for the Liberal party leadership in such a way that becomes “obvious” that he is interested in the position. His primary competitor, Bob Rae, will be doing the same (and already is; this prediction is that it will be “obvious”).
Failure. Just didn’t happen – needs an election to occur first.
5. (m) Barack Obama’s approval rating will be 40% or less sometime in the first half of 2010. In the second half of 2010 his approval rating will not make new lows compared to the first half of 2010.
Failure. Barring a major end-of-year swing, the rating is around 45%. This prediction was supposed to capture Obama’s unpopularity, which has happened, but just not in this particular polling metric.
6. (m) In the United Kingdom 2010 election, the Conservative Party will get a majority government, but there will be a surprisingly high result of non-Labour and non-Conservative candidates that have credible chances of winning seats in Parliament. Right now there are 99 seats held by non-Labour and non-Conservative members, and this will increase in the upcoming election.
Failure. Conservatives got a majority, and the third party seats were 86 elected in 2010 vs. 93 elected in 2005.
Vancouver 2010 Olympics
7. (m) After the closing ceremonies, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics are considered by the media to be “successful”, but not the groundbreaking exhibition that Expo 86 was for the Vancouver region; news trickles over the subsequent months post-Olympics about scandals concerning payouts, contracts, and guarantees to be claimed and picked up on the tab of the BC taxpayer. Benefits that were pitched with respect to BC tourism, minus the influx of media, IOC big-wigs and athletes’ families, will turn out to be much less than touted.
Partial success. The Olympics, by all accounts, were considered to be “successful”, but not groundbreaking. There were no major scandals concerning payouts and contract guarantees, although there was a lot of media about how the VANOC budget was “balanced” by offloading other government expenses off VANOC’s statements. Also, it was reported that the net economic impact before the Olympics was estimated to be $10 billion, while it reportedly was only $2.5 billion.
8. (m) Despite fears that the Sea-to-Sky highway will be jammed, due to stringent controls, nothing of significance will occur here other than some weather-related (snow/ice on the road) crashes. Finding a place to park in Whistler, Squamish and Pemberton will be a nightmare.
Partial Success. I have no way of figuring out how my parking prediction about the three Olympic towns north of Vancouver performed, but the Sea-to-Sky operated fine. On a side note, if you drive there on a summer day, it is frighteningly fast to get to Whistler – they really did a good job on the highway and got rid of most of the sharp turns.
9. (m) The roads leading to the Arthur Laing Bridge and Cambie Street north of 49th Avenue will be gummed up with more traffic, but other than this, it shouldn’t be any different in Vancouver. The Lion’s Gate Bridge will also have more traffic volume, but since traffic on the bridge is already a disaster people won’t notice the difference.
Failure. More people stayed out of downtown than ever during the Olympics, making the roads a dream during this time.
10. (e) No terrorist incidents at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics.
Success. Thankfully.
11. (e) Main and East Hastings of 2009 will look like the Main and East Hastings of February 2010. Oppenheimer Park will still be the preferred place to hang out for the day if you’re homeless. I will make it a point to walk around the area east of Gastown to verify this!
Unknown result. Did anybody reading this go around this area at the time?
12. (e) Unfortunately, I must predict the Canadian men’s hockey team will not win the gold medal.
Failure. Fortunately, Canada did not blow the gold medal game when it went into overtime with a minute to spare!
13. (m) The Canadian women’s hockey team will win the gold medal.
Success.
14. (e) Canada will win more than 7 gold medals (which was their gold count in 2006), and more than 24 total.
Success. 14 gold and 26 medals.
15. (m) Gordon Campbell will not step down in 2010, nor will he make an announcement or even a hint as such.
Failure. He turned in his papers on November 3, 2010.
Economics / Geopolitical
16. (m) Median condominium (apartment) sale prices in the Greater Vancouver area will peak in 2010 in the month of March or April and be less in November 2010 than in March 2010, using the statistics at REBGV.
Success. The REBGV index said for March 2010: $395,507, April 2010: $397,779. November 2010: $389,168, so there was a decline, albeit small. The peak price was in May 2010, $398,783. Although the prediction stated a peak in March or April, this is close enough that I will call it a full success.
17. (h) The BC government will increase the threshold of the first-time homebuyers’ exemption to the Property Transfer Tax from $425,000 to $500,000 during its 2010 budget.
Failure. Did not happen. The PTT is too much of a cash cow for the provincial government.
18. (m) Economic growth in China will continue to be “insanely high”, which we will define as 6% or higher.
Success. Accounts state it will be roughly 8-10%, but the point is that it was “insanely high”.
19. (m) The US dollar will end the year stronger than the Euro.
Success. USD/EUR was roughly 1.44 at year’s beginning, is currently 1.31 presently, which is about 10% strengthening.
20. (m) The US government will not get any “geopolitical concession” from a foreign country. I know this prediction is vague, but the essence of this prediction is that the US is perceived to be weak-kneed and will not use its military other than in politically correct contexts (e.g. sending troops to Afghanistan).
Success. Obama has shown he is useless in the geopolitical context (amongst other roles).
21. (m) The S&P 500′s high for the year will be reached in April-May 2010.
Failure. S&P 500 was 1110 at year’s beginning, peaked at about 1220 in April, went down to 1020 in early July, and then bounced back to 1247 today, the high of the year!
22. (m) As measured by corporate earnings via income tax collections, 2010 will be a much, much better year than 2009.
Success. October fiscal monitor has it up about 12% when comparing April 2009 to October 2009 vs. April 2010 to October 2010; I’m too lazy to compile the January to March periods, but it should be positive.
23. (m) GST collections will also be up from 2009 levels in 2010.
Success. Likewise, this is up about 19%.
24. (m) The $45.3 billion dollar deficit for the 2010-2011 fiscal year, as projected in September 2009, will be considered to be a high estimate (i.e. for the March 2010 budget, the estimated deficit will be less than $45.3 billion).
Failure. The actual deficit was projected to be $49.2 billion in the 2010 budget.
25. (m) Spot oil (light crude) will end 2010 between CAD$70-90/barrel. However, it will hit CAD$120 at some point in the year.
Likely failure. While the year is not over yet, crude is currently CAD$91/barrel now, and is the peak price for the year.
26. (h) Spot gold will slip below CAD$950/Oz at some point in 2010.
Failure. The low of the year was US$1050/Oz in February.
27. (m) The Bank of Canada target overnight rate will end the year at 1.25% (more likely) or 1.5% (less likely, but possible).
Failure. Rates are at 1.00%.
28. (e) The US Federal Reserve’s interest rate for 2010 year-end will be 0.5% or less.
Success. Rates are below 0.25%.
29. (m) The market rate for a five-year fixed rate mortgage will be between 4.75% to 5.50% in December 2010.
Failure. 5-year fixed is at 3.99% at ING; Coast Capital is at 3.65%, etc.
Culture
30. (m) The Vancouver Canucks will not make the playoffs.
Failure. They did get knocked out in the second round.
31. (m) Facebook will file form S-1 with the SEC (first step in going public).
Failure. I will be recycling this for 2011.
32. (e) Twitter will not file form S-1.
Success. They apparently raised $200 million privately.
33. (e) Google will still dominate Bing in the search engine space.
Success. Looking at my non-random sample of websites (such as this one), Google drives 20 times more traffic here than Bing or Yahoo.
34. (m) By the end of 2010, you will 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 (before sales tax). Competition in the mobile data market will have “obviously intensified”.
Success. The evidence is my own new cell plan, which has the above features for roughly $23/mo before sales tax. The trick is that these plans are not advertised. Shopping for cell plans almost reminds me of scouring the bowels of the internet to find the lowest price on some commodity product – it requires work, and determining whether the savings vs. time spent must be taken into consideration.
35. (h) Global warming (climate change) will no longer be the primary environmental focus by year’s end.
Partial failure. The reason why I am claiming partial is because the Gulf of Mexico drilling disaster brought oil once again into the limelight, rather than global warming. The emotional edge over global warming appears to have tapered off significantly over 2010, however. It is difficult to describe (much less quantify) this.
36. (h) There will be a “better public awareness” of consequences to automobiles (e.g. automobile fuel pump failures, lessened fuel efficiency) due to the government-mandated mixing of increased levels of ethanol and biofuels in conventional gasoline.
Failure. Maybe next year.
37. (h) Tiger Woods will win at least one major golf championship (this is one of: The Masters, US Open, British Open, PGA Championship).
Failure. He did get close:
Masters – 4th
US Open – 4th
British Open – Tied 23rd
PGA Championship – Tied 28th
Let’s see you make 4 cuts on the majors, and get two top-10 performances. That’s pretty successful in most people’s books, but Tiger of course is an exception.
38. (m) Microsoft Windows XP usage will still have an above 50% penetration rate, according to W3School’s statistical survey and other comparable sources (e.g. via Wikipedia). Windows Vista will be less than 15%.
Failure. Close – XP is at 47% in November 2010. It went below 50% on October. Windows 7 is more popular than I otherwise would have expected.
39. (h) The phrase “Social Networking” will have peaked in 2009, according to Google Trends (picture here).
Failure. While peaked in 2009 at 2.2-2.3, it reached about 3.0 in 2010 on Google’s trend index, in part due to the movie, “The Social Network“. Really, if you got rid of this, I would have nailed this prediction! I will point out that the end of 2010′s index is smaller than the end of 2009.
I have been noticing more and more companies include audio “chimes” in or at the end of their advertisements to build brand awareness. I am finding this to be somewhat annoying.
The very first instance I can remember was Intel’s chime, but this has been subsequently superseded with Rogers, Shaw, Koodoo Mobile, Yellow Pages (yes, they have one), etc.
I wonder how much of this audio pollution will “stick” into our brains just as the video format.
This has to be the best prediction of life in 2011 from the 1931 perspective, from William Ogburn. Although I don’t know if he made 10,000 predictions and this was the only one to be correct, what he did say here was frighteningly accurate:
The population of the United States eighty years hence will be 160,000,000 and either stationary or declining, and will have a larger percentage of old people than there is today. Technological progress, with its exponential law of increase, holds the key to the future. Labor displacement will proceed even to automatic factories. The magic of remote control will be commonplace. Humanity’s most versatile servant will be the electron tube. The communication and transportation inventions will smooth out regional differences and level us in some respects to uniformity. But the heterogeneity of material culture will mean specialists and languages that only specialists can understand. The countryside will be transformed by technology and farmers will be more like city folk. There will be fewer farmers, more wooded land with wild life. Personal property in mechanical conveniences will be greatly extended. Some of these will be needed to prop up the weak who will survive.
Inevitable technological progress and abundant natural resources yield a higher standard of living. Poverty will be eliminated and hunger as a driving force of revolution will not be a danger. Inequality of income and problems of social justice will remain. Crises of life will be met by insurance.
The role of government is bound to grow. Technicians and special interest groups will leave only a shell of democracy. The family cannot be destroyed but will be less stable in the early years of married life, divorce being greater than now. The lives of woman will be more like those of men, spent more outside the home. The principle of expediency will be the dominating one in law and ethics.
The population of the USA was projected to be about 310 million in 2010; in 1930 it was 123 million. Other than this, the rest of what this guy said was spot-on.
For those that claim that poverty has not been eliminated, take into context that the poor people of today live far better lives today than your average middle-class citizen did 100 years ago. Starvation is almost unheard of. This is contrasted with early 20th century life where starvation was a factor for many families, especially in rural parts.
If there is any question that Rail for the Valley advocates don’t have a clue when it comes to project costing, they should look no further than page 20 of the Fraser Valley Transit Study:
This isn’t even close – even if you extend the route length of the “rapid bus” service, the operating/capital costs won’t even come close to the high levels it would take for getting rail service up.
Also, consider the extension of the West Coast Express from Mission to Abbotsford vs. the installation of a rapid bus from the same locations:
The result is not surprising – when you bake in capital costs (which are quite relevant and real, unlike what rail proponents try to shield), bus is very much cheaper.
Note these assumptions fall if roads become so congested that you can no longer use the bus as an option – hence the reason why Skytrain is a much more attractive alternative than using rapid bus to get people from Surrey Central Station to Downtown Vancouver. But for Abbotsford-Mission, this type of congestion is not anticipated.
Finally, for the final analysis – putting a rail line from Chilliwack to Scott Road Station in Surrey, has the not-so-surprising result as follows:
There is no way that rail can be economically justified. Anybody claiming otherwise is trying to steal money from the public since nobody else would dare finance the project.
I’ve been looking at computer hardware prices just to see what is out there. My main notebook is a Dell Vostro, purchased back in June of 2008. It has a Core 2 Duo, 3 gigabytes of RAM, 17″ display, 802.11a/b/g/n wireless, webcam/microphone, 250GB HDD, and most importantly, runs Windows XP. The notebook has performed very well – no complaints whatsoever about it.
I bought it for CAD$825 before GST/PST (with free shipping).
What does CAD$825 buy you now these days?
Looking at the latest prices for the same type of Dell notebooks, now you can get something with an Intel i370, 4GB of RAM, Windows 7 Professional (64-bit, note that 32-bit operating systems do not use more than roughly 3GB of RAM!), and 320GB HDD for $709 (plus HST).
Although this is not a quantum leap over my existing hardware, it is a more powerful system (I’d guesstimate 30%) for approximately 14% less cost.
That said, I won’t be buying a new computer in 2010! I don’t want to leave Windows XP, not yet.
An Angus Reid poll, taken in early December, polling 1013 Canadians had the following totals and regional splits:
Conservatives: 38%
Liberal: 26%
NDP: 18%
Bloc: 10% (Quebec: 39%)
Greens: 7%
When you round the 2008 election results, the above results are identical. Not similar, but identical.
The regional split tells a slightly different story:
BC/AB/(MB/SK)/ON/QC/Atlantic
Conservatives: 39/50/51/44/18/41
Liberal: 25/22/24/31/19/38
NDP: 30/10/22/16/17/17
Bloc: 0/0/0/0/39/0
Green: 4/16/3/8/5/4
When you compare the the 2008 election, the Conservatives report slightly weaker in BC, Alberta, Quebec; they are slightly stronger in Ontario and Atlantic Canada.
When you work out a seat split, you get the following, which is not a strictly mathematical allocation and involves some “fuzzy logic” (i.e. educated guesswork):
Conservatives: (-2)/0/0/(+8)/(-3)/(+3)
This gives you +6, or 149 seats. Not quite a majority.
Some seats, however, must be looked at individually. A good example of this is Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, where long-time MP Keith Martin (who has won his seat by slim margins in the past three elections) announced that he is not running in the next election.
The recent House of Commons opposition motion (which is non-binding) passed today in a vote:
November 30, 2010 — Mr. Cullen (Skeena—Bulkley Valley) — That, in the opinion of the House, the government should immediately propose legislation to ban bulk oil tanker traffic in the Dixon Entrance, Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound as a way to protect the West Coast’s unique and diverse ocean ecosystem, to preserve the marine resources which sustain the community and regional economies of British Columbia, and to honour the extensive First Nations rights and title in the area.
This motion is an indirect response to the proposed Enbridge Pipeline (information) that will connect the Alberta oil sands to Kitimat. If the motion were to be enacted, it would essentially kill the project.
Most people have huge ignorance of oil-related issues even though the transport and utilization of oil has been one of the most important developments in 20th century life. The price of oil dictates the cost of nearly everything around us – the price of energy is baked into everything. Most people that speak against the transport and consumption of oil willfully forget the relevance of oil. It is nearly impossible to engage activists in a rational dialogue on energy policy.
Most people do not know that oil pipelines already exist within the Lower Mainland – for example, there is a pipe extending from the Port of Vancouver to the Vancouver International Airport. There is a natural gas pipeline that is only visible when it crosses the Fraser River between Agassiz and Hope. Fossil fuel pipelines are all around us.
Fossil fuels currently represent the cheapest source of condensed and transportable energy. The closest competitor is alcohol (mainly ethanol) which has about 1/3rd less energy density than conventional gasoline and still requires fossil fuel inputs to produce in relevant quantities.
The motion is equal to the analogy of banning truck traffic on highways because they might lose their loads and kill automobile passengers. Yes, it has happened (most notable local example was a few years ago on Highway 1 in North Vancouver when a truck lost its load of raw logs and ended up killing the unfortunate driver that was behind), but it is the risk that we take as a society to make life better for all of us. By enacting a blanket ban on transporting energy, we do more damage than good at this point in time.
Finally, most people are not aware that the proposed pipeline transports natural gas eastbound, which is a significant input to the upgrading of bitumen into synthetic crude oil.
I am quite surprised that the Walmart Supercenter in Chilliwack is as popular as it was when I went to it a couple times. (See my previous post on Walmart vs. Superstore, which has attracted an odd amount of traffic to this site). Originally I thought the location for the store was sub-par, but my conjecture has turned out to be fairly incorrect.
The opening day apparently was “nuts”, and I decided to drive by there the second day just to see the hooplah – and indeed, the parking lot was full.
Traffic density along Ashwell Road is going to be a much bigger issue when the rest of the Eagle Landing area is developed – heading northbound, there is a left-turn bay that will allow access, but if there is much more traffic coming to the area then it is clear that the existing 2-lane configuration is not going to be adequate. When the new Home Depot goes up, it will also not help with traffic.
The store layout is identical to other Walmart supercenters – the grocery section is on one side, and the rest of the stuff that Walmart sells is the other 3/4 of the store.
In terms of pricing, while I didn’t write a list of specific items out, my anecdotal impression is that while certain items are generally less expensive than Superstore, overall it “felt” more expensive. This ran contrary to the impression that Walmart offers cheaper stuff. Maybe their non-grocery items were cheaper, but it is more difficult to make direct comparisons with non-grocery items.
Because the store is located on a Indian reserve (Squiala First Nation), status Indians are able to make purchases at Walmart tax-free (i.e. no HST). Not surprisingly, I saw a lot of First Nation people shopping there.
As far as I can see, the new Walmart hasn’t affected traffic at Superstore – when I went to Superstore, there was still the usual amount of traffic density there. I’d be curious to know if their actual sales numbers have dropped, especially now that they have done their store redesign.