Double Blind

I just love all of this pre-parliamentary banter about all the parties beating their chests like gorillas as they prepare for the start of the Winter session of the House of Commons scheduled for January 31, 2011 barring an unlikely prorogation or dissolution of Parliament. It seems to be an application of Sun Tzu’s Art of War:

Warfare is the Way of deception.

Therefore, if able, appear unable,

if active, appear not active,

if near, appear far,

if far, appear near.

If they have advantage, entice them;

if they are confused, take them,

if they are substantial, prepare for them,

if they are strong, avoid them,

if they are angry, disturb them,

if they are humble, make them haughty,

if they are relaxed, toil them,

if they are united, separate them.

Attack where they are not prepared, go out to where they do not expect.

This specialized warfare leads to victory, and may not be transmitted beforehand.

Before doing battle, in the temple one calculates and will win, because many calculations were made;

before doing battle, in the temple one calculates and will not win, because few calculations were made;

many calculations, victory, few calculations, no victory, then how much less so when no calculations

By means of these, I can observe them, beholding victory or defeat!

It seems the louder the parties beat their chests and make noises about an election, the less likely it is to occur.

The following picture was taken on “Day 1″ of the 2008 election campaign in Richmond, BC:

On January 23, 2006, Canadians voted in 124 Conservative MPs forming a government with Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the helm. He wasn’t expected to ever lead a government, and he wasn’t ever expected to last this long. But five years later, and one election later, Stephen Harper is still around.

In a couple weeks, the Harper administration will have lasted longer than Lester B. Pearson’s minority government – Harper officially took office on February 6, 2006. Pearson’s administration lasted five years plus a couple days.

Now you hear the same critics say that Stephen Harper will never form a majority government. We will see!

Apparently the media are claiming they received an audio tape from Osama bin Laden.

I very carefully worded one of my “predictions for 2011” as the following:

4. (m) There will be no “live” or otherwise clear video recording of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Audio does not count, nor grainy internet images.

My theory is that he died a long time ago.

I thought this short article was illuminating, especially since health care once again will become political fodder in this upcoming decade as provincial governments blow their entire budgets on it.

This video involves the arrest of Buddy Tavares, a 51-year old. The raw youtube video can be found here. The related CKNW story can be found here, and there is all sorts of news stories about it in the media.

In my opinion, this kick to the head was inappropriate and the officer should be charged with assault.

Previously I made an opinion on an October 2009 case concerning the Abbotsford Police, where I deemed a kick in the head was appropriate in the arrest situation.

In the Tavares case, it is clear the police officer had control of the situation and the physical assault was unnecessary, even when accounting for the “fog of war” that occurs during these arrest situations.

Tavares is very very lucky that somebody took a video of the arrest – without it, there would be no investigation and no story.

Being in law enforcement is a no-win job – enforcing the rules always keeps you under the scrutiny of the public, but the powers that are vested to police by government legislation are immense – hence, I support keeping our police accountable, especially in situations like this.

I glossed over the Metro Vancouver Regional Growth Strategy draft document. One item is table A1 (page 68) that outlines the anticipated growth in population and dwellings in the region. From 2006 to 2021, it goes from 2.195 million to 2.78 million people, which is about 1.6% annualized growth.

Dwellings go from 848k to 1130k, which is about a 1.9% annualized growth in dwellings.

Breaking this down into regions, Surrey/White Rock is anticipated to have 2.2% growth in population, while Vancouver/UBC (formally known as “Electoral Area A”) is at 0.86%. Langley (Township and City) top the growth with 2.5%.

One can only assume that development will be bringing more and more compact residential units in urban areas. Most of the growth is anticipated to be in the metropolitan cores (e.g. Downtown Vancouver, Surrey Central) and regional urban centres (e.g. Metrotown, Richmond Centre, etc.)

Since Vancouver development has pretty much exhausted itself (except upward into the sky), it is vitally important for city planners to ensure that Surrey has adequate infrastructure to handle its inevitable boom in population. Already a lot of the people I know in my age bracket are settling in Surrey, simply due to valuation and proximity to various sources of employment.

The big question that has to be asked: is safe to assume the population will be growing for the next 30 years? Ultimately, costs will rise to such a point where net migration reaches zero or even negative. When that point is reached is very difficult to judge. However, it will happen.

I have been watching the various campaign pledges performed by the BC Liberal candidates for party leader (and subsequently Premier), and there have been some policy announcements (by nearly all candidates) that make me concerned for the welfare of the province.

However, the pledge to encourage online voting is the worst of them all.

There is the following clause in the Canada Elections Act:

163. The vote is secret.

I won’t get into the history behind the secret vote, but it allows free expression of political preference at the ballot box. It also enables the “silent majority” to participate in the election process; otherwise only the hyper-partisan would ever vote, to the detriment of everybody else. A secret vote has a moderating influence on political discourse.

One of the advantages of the way we currently vote is that the vote casting is decentralized in multiple polls per electoral district (about 400 people per poll) that obscures the way that individual people vote, hence keeping the vote secret.

From my past experience dealing with computer systems, there is absolutely no way with a centralized online voting system that you can do BOTH of the following:

a) maintain the secrecy of the vote; AND
b) preserving the integrity of the vote count.

You can have one, but not the other.

I am very strongly against online voting, at least in the context of voting for a candidate in a federal, provincial or municipal election. I would make an exception for referendums.

Bandwidth metering is going to cause the death of decentralized internet innovation as we know it. What I mean by decentralized is that bandwidth carriers are going to try to assert their authority against those that provide content and services across the wires. It is the attempt of internet service providers to centralize service delivery since decentralized products are directly competing against bandwidth carriers’ own offerings (cable and satellite television).

More specifically, this means that businesses such as Netflix will have no chance of being able to effectively compete in Canada without paying a toll to ISPs. This also effectively makes such operations as using Bittorrent to retrieve files as likely being cost-prohibitive.

I notice Shaw Cable (in addition to other internet service providers across Canada, including Bell, Telus, Rogers, etc.) are including monthly bandwidth caps in their service offerings. I do not recall seeing these before a few months ago.

I pay about $47/mo for high speed cable internet (“extreme”) from Shaw, and now this is apparently good for 100 gigabytes a month. I have no clue what I do in an average month.

Economics of bandwidth usage is a very fuzzy topic mainly because the commodity itself is zero marginal cost for a provider to provide – the primary cost is capital (putting up routers and wires up all over the place) and electricity to operate the network. It does not cost the network provider any more if I use 10 gigabytes or 100 gigabytes – it instead just causes congestion and capacity issues for other potential users depending on the time of day that I use this bandwidth.

It will also be interesting when people that have their computer systems virused up to the hilt complain about $300/mo bills due to “data overages” when they are some 75 year old grandmother that uses their system for just checking her email. It is also not that difficult to induce data traffic from a person’s IP address, so being on the receiving end of an attack would not only just be a nuisance, but also economically damaging.

A moral solution would be to degrade service (setting data packets to low priority delivery status) if bandwidth consumption goes above a certain level, but this is not going to achieve the commercial aims of the internet service providers in Canada. Due to limited competition (nobody is going to compete with Telus or Shaw for last-mile installations to individual homes in BC) it is also unlikely that competition could come in on an “unlimited data” scheme.

This is going to end badly, mainly that companies are going to have to beg and grovel with the CRTC and lobby to death the government in order to achieve their economic aims. The government will decide who wins, and thus the cost of all of this is that it will considerably slow down innovation relating to the internet, such as what Netflix is trying to do with video-on-demand services.

So even on a retail level this is a cold-blooded move, on the business/economic side of things, this might increase Shaw’s bottom line as they will now be able to load up more people on their network for less capital costs. Ticker symbol is SJR-B!

This is a monumental moment at Double Blind – for the first time in over seven years, I actually used a cell phone to take a picture and post it online.

When I was at Superstore a couple days ago, I noticed that they were clearing out the Eggnog. I had earlier indicated my disgust at the “light” version. The stock was clearing out at 74 cents a litre (limit 4) and look what I found:

For clarity all the red cartons are the “regular” (or “traditional”) eggnog, while the cartons on the right are the “light” eggnog.

It is once again time to make some predictions for what will happen in 2011. My crystal ball has always been very cloudy on these sorts of issues, mainly because I like sticking my neck out and making very narrow-ranged predictions is a good way of guaranteeing they will fail. Some of my predictions will be recycled from prior years (the expression “a stopped clock is correct twice a day” is apt here).

For the scorekeepers, here were the predictions I made for 2010, and the results of them are here.

I will rank each prediction with my perceived risk factor, with an index of: (e) = easy, (m) = medium, and (h) = high. Unfortunately, due to lack of mental inspiration, a lot of these are recycled from last year.

Politics
1. (e) Stephen Harper will be Prime Minister on December 31, 2011.
2. (m) Canadians will vote in a general federal election between July 1 to December 31, 2011.
3. (e) The Green Party of Canada will not win a seat in an election.
4. (e) No British Columbia general election in 2011.
5. (m) In Ontario’s 2011 general election, a minority government will be voted in.
6. (e) No “meaningful” Canada senate reform will take place – i.e. no elected senate, no term limits, no redistribution of seats.
7. (m) Rampant end-of-year media speculation that Barack Obama will not run for a second term as president. Prediction is also successful if he announces he will not run again.
8. (m) California Governor Jerry Brown will be credited in trying to turn around California’s fiscal situation (compared to Schwartzeneggar, who was viewed as unable to do anything about it).
9. (m) The next BC NDP Opposition Leader will be Adrian Dix.
10. (e) All recall campaigns will fail in BC.
11. (h) The HST or equivalent remains at year-end in BC. To “test” this prediction, if I purchase a coffee at Tim Hortons at year-end, it will have a 12% sales tax applied to it.

Geopolitical
1. (m) Julian Assange, creator of Wikileaks, will not be incarcerated at December 31, 2011.
2. (m) A security incident at a North American airport will result in more stringent measures to be adopted world-wide. People complain, but still put up with the increasingly stringent security measures.
3. (h) There will be a significant power failure on the transmission grid in North America that will cause an event of a near-equivalent scale of the 2003 Northeast Blackout.
4. (m) There will be no “live” or otherwise clear video recording of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Audio does not count, nor grainy internet images.

Financial
1. (m) Regular unleaded gas prices will exceed the $1.50/litre that was seen in the Lower Mainland in 2008, creating headlines clearly focused on the price of gasoline, especially around the July 1 carbon tax increase in BC.
2. (m) The Greater Vancouver Real Estate market, as measured by REBGV, will end the year lower for a condominium than at the beginning of the year.
3. (m) Food prices, as measured by Statistics Canada (example here), will be at least 3% higher in 2011 than 2010 although it will “feel” more than this.

Miscellaneous
1. (e) The Chevrolet Volt will be commercially “insignificant”.
2. (m) The Nissan Leaf will sell more in 2011 than the Chevrolet Volt.
3. (m) The Higgs Boson will not be discovered in 2011 even with the Large Hadron Collider being fully operational.
4. (h) Vancouver Canucks will win the Stanley Cup. What the heck, have to predict this eventually…
5. (m) Facebook will file S-1 and go public.
6. (h) Twitter will be sold.
7. (m) Mac will not get above 10% penetration in terms of OS usage on the W3Stats index.
8. (m) At least one of Wind Mobile, Mobilicity or Public Mobile will either “sell out” their business or otherwise go out of business.
9. (m) The iPad will face a credible competitor. To give an idea of “credible”, it is what Blackberry or Android devices are to the iPhone. It is NOT what Microsoft Zune is to the iPod!
10. (e) “Social Networking“, “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” will not reach 2010′s peak value on Google Trends.