On Work

Here is a great video, now 3 years old, where Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame talks about work and the failure of western society to make work “attractive”, particularly those jobs that we really need:   Here also is a link to Rowe’s action after his revelation about the need for more people to be …

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Alberta electricity “market” is broken

Back in 2000, the PC government of Ralph Klein purported to “deregulate” the electricity industry, with the promise that more competition and the free market would provide more choice and better prices for Albertans.   But something went wrong. Today, although many power plants have been built and the total installed base of power generation …

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The Decline of America

In Mark Steyn’s recent treatise, After America, he makes the case that American society is doomed unless the people of the United States very rapidly repudiate the social welfare state and expansive federal government that they have voted for repeatedly over the last fifty years.   This data, which I found at Zero Hedge, shows …

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The City of Calgary shouldn’t waste time on “sustainable food”

The other day on my drive home, Angela Kokott (CHQR 770 drive home show host) interviewed Calgary alderman Giancarlo Carra (Ward 9) about the City of Calgary’s  efforts to consider the “Sustainability of the Food Supply”.  Carra droned on about the need for the City to have a food plan to make sure that all Calgarians …

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There will be no Deus Ex Machina

Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge has provided a link to a very good article at Gold Switzerland: With most of the world’s major economies as well as the financial system bankrupt, there is only one solution that can save the world economy. Like in the Greek tragedies, Deus ex Machina is now the only way that …

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On WorkAlberta electricity “market” is brokenThe Decline of AmericaThe City of Calgary shouldn’t waste time on “sustainable food”There will be no Deus Ex Machina

Aug
15

Book Review : Reckless Endangerment

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In Reckless Endangerment, Gretchen Morgenstern and Joshua Rosner, both of the New York Times, do a reasonable job of exposing some of the greed and corruption that led to the financial collapse of 2008 and the Great Recession which America finds itself unable to recover from even three years later.

I found the exposé of Fannie Mae’s management style and lobbying of Congress offensive, even though it was not illegal – I am most offended by the ease by which members of the US government could be bought off so easily with promises of investment in their districts and fear-mongering about people being denied loans.   Morgenster and Rosner point out, albeit briefly, many of the items raised by Thomas E. Woods in Meltdown – although I think Woods did a better job of showing that the true root cause of these problems lie with the US Government and Federal Reserve system interfering in the economy. Read the rest of this entry »

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Aug
15

Book Review : Rollback

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I first read Thomas E. Woods in his book Meltdown, which I reviewed two years ago.  Hi most recent book, Rollback, attempts to lay out a process by which America – and by extension many western countries, including Canada – can reduce the size of government and remove many of the ways the government interferes in the economy.

He covers the real crisis that America faces – that government is too big, and too invasive into the domain of business.  He clearly explains why government is a cause of the problems and cannot be the solution.  More government involvement in any part of the economy will only lead to more pain.   Read the rest of this entry »

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Aug
07

Mark Cuban on Patent Law

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Mark Cuban has a very good post recommending improvements to the patent law system.  While his reference is clearly the US patent system, this applies to most of the patent laws around the world, including here in Canada.

I would add one more thing to Mr. Cuban’s short list of fixes.  While he focuses on software patents and process patents, I would also ban the granting of patents for scientific discoveries, such as gene discoveries.  Just because you were the first to discover a gene doesn’t mean you can patent it, nor do I think you should get to patent the test for it, unless there is some truly novel and non-obvious method to the test.  If it was simply running a sample through a PCR, that shouldn’t count.  If you had to invent a new machine, patent the machine.  Otherwise it’s just a version of a process patent.

I agree with Mr. Cuban.  Ban patents on software, work processes and scientific discoveries.  The current system in these areas is stifling innovation and giving too much power to firms that already have market dominance and buckets of money.

 

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Aug
06

On Infrastructure Spending in Calgary

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Although it has passed from the daily news in the City of Calgary, we still have a budget problem.  The municipal government is spending too much money and is having to raise property taxes steeply to pay for it all.   Municipal politicians, such as Mayor Nenshi, continue complain that cities should be given more money by the province, or the feds, or the fiscal balance needs to be corrected.  I don’t disagree with him on that one – I think the level of government that provides a service should raise the money for that service.

But the subject of my post today is on the selection of capital projects in the City of Calgary and whether they make any sense – because if they don’t, then we are wasting money on something of dubious value. Read the rest of this entry »

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Aug
06

An excellent rant on why business doesn’t trust Obama or Congress

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h/t sda

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Jul
11

Santelli on the US Debt Ceiling

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Rick Santelli goes on a classic rant:

He clearly points out that the US Government must start to live within the revenue it has, and not just reduce the growth in government spending, but actually reduce spending and come up with a real plan to balance the budget.

The other folks in that vi

deo don’t get it – they think Santelli is demanding default and wants a “hard reset”. He just wants the government to figure out how to pay the bills within it’s means. And he is right that if they don’t now, the pain will simply be worse next year or the year after.

Canada should not be smug.  We will suffer when the US hits the wall.   And we aren’t in much better shape – while the feds are reducing the deficit, many provinces are still in dire straits and no province can default without hurting the whole country – and do you think Ottawa will stand by while Ontario or Quebec goes broke???

 

h/t sda

 

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Jun
19

Could be about Canadian Health care

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Small Dead Animals points us to an excellent column in the Telegraph, which points out that we need honesty and hard decisions on the health care system – and that while right leaning politicians know the right answer, they are too afraid to speak to us like adults.  I raised this during the 2011 federal election campaign, but alas it was completely bypassed in the court of public opinion.

While Janet Daley‘s column is specific to the UK situation, it would apply even more so to Canada, where we don’t have anything even close to the parallel private system that exists in the UK.  But she is right – we need to look to continental Europe for ideas, not America.

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Jun
16

A Lesson for Canada’s Dairy Industry

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And for the Government of Canada.  The Economist, in the Monday 20 June 2011 print edition, has an article on the success of New Zealand’s agricultural exports.

Some 25 years ago, the NZ government, in a spate of government cuts, dismantled the supply management system that had coddled various agricultural businesses for decades.  The result?

In April it recorded its biggest trade surplus in history: NZ$1.1 billion ($890m), or about 7% of GDP at an annual rate. Strong overseas demand has pushed its terms of trade (the price it fetches for its exports, relative to the price it must pay for imports) to a 37-year high (see chart).

Looming large in this surplus are dairy products—butter, cheese and especially milk powder—which accounted for over a quarter of New Zealand’s merchandise exports. With its swathes of rain-fed pastures, New Zealand now claims a third of world dairy exports. For comparison, that is twice Saudi Arabia’s share of world oil exports.

…New Zealand sells vast quantities of milk powder to Chinese consumers wary of local brands damaged by food-safety scandals.  Chinese tourists sometimes stock up on baby formula on their travels and sell the tins back home.

Perhaps Canada should do the same.  Our domestic milk market is crippled by low efficiency and high prices that penalize consumers for the sake of a few quota-holding farmers.  It prevents domestic farmers, cheesemakers and milk powder producers from competing in the global marketplace.  If little New Zealand, with it’s limited land area, can own that much of the world market in dairy exports – what could Canada do if unchained from the teat of state largesse?

Are you listening Mr. Harper?

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Jun
16

Little Ice Age, redux?

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At the American Astronomical Society (AAS) conference this week, three papers lead to the conclusions that Solar Cycle 24 is very weak and that Solar Cycle 25 may not really happen at all.  This is bad news for our climate.

The problem with a “quiet” sun, lacking sunspots, is that when it has happened before notably during the Maunder (1645-1715) and Dalton (1790-1830) Minimums, the climate of the earth got noticeably colder.  There are various theories for why this is, ranging from actual decline in solar output to decreased solar wind incident on the earth’s magnetic field, allowing more interstellar cosmic radiation to impact our atmosphere, creating more clouds and thus reflecting more of the sun’s energy back into space.

Now, I am the first to agree that correlation does not equal causation, especially with two datapoints.  But if we look at the carbon-14 signal in trees (pre-1950 when nuclear testing contaminated the data), it appears that the solar activity is fairly well correlated to climate changes over the last 1200 years or so.    Some have said the Maunder minimum didn’t correlate well to the Little Ice Age period, which lasted from 1300-1700.  But if you consider the Spörer minimum as well, and the fact that the increase in solar activity between the Spörer and Maunder hardly reached the level of the Dalton minimum, then the solar “minimum” really lasted nearly 300 years.

If it comes to be that Solar Cycle 25 looks like the Maunder or Dalton periods, and the climate correlation holds, then next 20-50 years (or longer) could be chilly.  This would be bad from the perspective of food production and my enjoyment of golf.

Recall that during the Maunder and Dalton Minimum periods, rivers like the Thames froze regularly.  That hasn’t happened since 1815.  And if such a cooling event does happen in the next 10 years, I can’t see how anyone will be able to sell the world on the dangers of anthropogenic climate change/global warming.  So watch the news for late snow melts running into summer, early snowfalls, and record low temperatures for extended periods.   London may again see a Christmas like was describe in Dickens’ novels…

 

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Jun
16

IPCC fiction, again

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Steve McIntyre has again identified that the UN IPCC is making things up, and publishing them as “facts” when there is no supporting evidence whatsoever.  Further, he points out that this claim:

Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows.

is simply a Greenpeace scenario and that a Greenpeace activist was made the lead author of an IPCC WG3 report and evaluated his own work…

Steve has gotten someone at IPCC to admit that this “scenario” was simply one of the most optimistic scenarios, and has no basis in a realistic, or economically feasible, future prediction.

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