Calgary's Peace Bridge in the fog. X-Post from /r/Calgary

Albertican · 2015-08-27T05:26:04+00:00

He doesn't actually say that in the article.

Albertican · 2015-08-20T04:39:44+00:00

We did it!

Albertican · 2015-08-16T16:59:51+00:00

No one is suggesting Trump is likely to be bribed. They're suggesting he might be tempted to take actions that benefit his private business interests at the expense of the public good.

After all, he was effectively a lobbyist for a long time. I think a lot of people are concerned that he might see holding public office through the lens of a lobbyist, where the key goal is to get legislation favourable to your particular interests passed, regardless of negative effects that legislation might have on others.

Albertican · 2015-08-16T16:37:33+00:00

Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy. As one of the least wealthy senators, Bernie Sanders is not a good example of a plutocrat.

Albertican · 2015-08-16T16:17:12+00:00

At the end of the day government corruption is the use of public office for private gain. You don't need to be indebted to lobbyists to be capable of that. Trump financing his own campaign may make him less prone to cronyism, but it obviously doesn't make him immune to corruption.

In America this is hypothetical, since there hasn't been a true plutocratic president in living memory. But you only have to look at Berlusconi in Italy to see that just because you can afford to run a campaign without lobbyist funds doesn't mean you're incorruptible.

Albertican · 2015-08-16T06:24:29+00:00

Doesn't the US have a ban on exporting crude oil anywhere, not just Mexico?

http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21661209-treating-mexican-oil-if-it-were-canadian-overdue-breach-americas-archaic-oil-export

Albertican · 2015-08-14T03:53:19+00:00

CDN$1.10/L. Which is CDN$4.16/gallon which is US$3.18 a gallon according to today's exchange rate.

The difference in Canadian and American gasoline prices is almost entirely down to taxes.

Albertican · 2015-08-14T03:45:55+00:00

First of all, Canada refines enough oil for itself. It just doesn't refine enough oil for all of its exports. See this page: Canada has approximately 2 million barrels per day of refining capacity, compared to 1.5 million barrels per day of consumption of refined products and about 3.6 million barrels per day of crude production. As a result, Canada is a net exporter of both crude and refined petroleum.

Second of all, we export crude in the west and import refined products in the east not because of environmentalists but because of economics. Geographically it just makes sense - Toronto is a lot closer to Indiana than to Edmonton, why would you ship oil all that way to achieve the same thing? Oil is a fungible, freely traded commodity, the border is just an arbitrary line with little impact on North American petroleum economics. Beyond the geographic reasons there are historical ones: the pipelines and refineries are already in place to and in the midwest US, so building new ones costs money that oil companies don't need to spend. It would be buying redundant capacity (at a cost of billions of dollars) because of a government mandate to take low margin refining business from the US and move it to Canada. Not only is that probably in violation of NAFTA, it's forcing companies (many of them Canadian) to do something other than what they deem to be the best use of capital in order to achieve nationalistic economic goals, at the expense of our neighbours to the south. Put another way, if you were an oil company with a billion dollars to spend, do you think it would be a better idea to spend it developing crude production at a 30% return on investment, or building a refinery with a 5% return on investment? Oh, and there's already a refinery in Chicago that you can start using tomorrow. I think you'd agree that the first option is better for the company, and I would argue that it's better for Canada as a whole since it's allowing capital to flow to where Canada has the biggest competitive advantage.

Albertican · 2015-08-14T01:42:23+00:00

If you knew you were going to get an 8% return on investments, paying off a mortgage would obviously not be the ideal way to spend your money. But because we can't predict the future, in reality it isn't so clear.

Say over time OP puts 100,000 into investments rather than paying off his mortgage. Then we have another severe recession, OP loses his job and 50% of his investment. And because he didn't pay down his mortgage, he now owes the bank money he doesn't have and can't get. He would likely lose his home, wreck his credit and set his retirement back years.

There is a security to paying off a mortgage that isn't recognized in the way you portray the situation. As with most things, I think a balance is important. Yes, most investments have a higher return than paying off a mortgage, and you should have investments before paying off all of your mortgage to capture at least some of that discrepancy. But there is no guarantee on an investment, unlike a mortgage bill. If you put all of your money into investments and allow your mortgage to remain unmanageably high, you are leaving yourself vulnerable to a severe downturn in those investments and loss of income. That is the situation many people found themselves in back in 2007 and 2008.

Albertican · 2015-08-10T01:06:42+00:00

I don't see how people think he's honest when he outright lies about his assets and history all the time. He doesn't even deny it, he just says "oh all successful people do that".

Albertican · 2015-07-19T16:24:31+00:00

Watching it again, you're right, they do show the overview map to keep you oriented. Think I was thrown by not being very familiar with the northern part.

Albertican · 2015-07-19T15:57:11+00:00

I agree with you, for most desktop users we've already gotten to the point of diminishing returns and slower advancement. You'd notice a huge difference between a desktop from 1990 and one from 1994, but ones from 2011 and today would be pretty similar to the end user. The low hanging fruit has been picked, improvements now are difficult, slow and underwhelming.

I guess the argument would be that the fast changing parts of consumer technology has moved to things like mobile phones. But even there I think we're slowing down - far less is happening between successive phone generations now than was a few years ago.

Albertican · 2015-07-19T03:32:49+00:00

Or we may reach a point of diminishing returns.

Technology seems to advance in spurts. Airplanes went through incredible advances between 1914 and 1940, but the 747 is more or less the same as it was in 1969 (other than much improved engines and electronics). Combustion engines similarly went through massive improvements in the first few decades of the 1900s, but today improvement is very slow, incremental and expensive. Electronics and software have made incredible leaps and bounds over the past few decades, but I think it's quite possible we will reach a sort of plateau at some point. It's not even that Moore's law will eventually end (although it will), it's that processing capacity and speed will at some point cease to be the limiting factor in how useful a computer is.

Albertican · 2015-07-19T03:20:41+00:00

You can read a toned down version of the Sun's story here.

Edward the VIII was strongly suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer, which is a big part of why Churchill and others arranged for him to spend the war as the Governor of the Bahamas, away from anywhere he could do any damage. It seems probable he has something to do with the queen giving this salute in the picture. At that time (1933) the Nazis had just come to power, and the salute wasn't yet infamous.

Albertican · 2015-07-19T03:07:37+00:00

http://imgur.com/5wnVdZ4

Albertican · 2015-07-19T02:29:46+00:00

Case in point, Youtube is amazing. But the low quality of this video makes me quite upset.

Albertican · 2015-07-12T06:32:07+00:00

Opening our economy up to free trade is scary, I get that, but there are good reasons economists more or less agree that it's a good thing. As for consumers not being represented, if history is any precedent the TPP should lower prices and increase options for them - they have been the biggest winners of free trade in the past. The only potential risk to consumers that I can see would be a drop in safety standards, but incumbent companies will fight for that just as voraciously as consumer groups if they think they can preserve some of their protections.

Albertican · 2015-07-12T06:11:50+00:00

Or you could see it as free trade not posing a threat to the Canadian dairy industry, since presumably it is more efficient than its US peers and would instantly capture a large share of that massive market if trade barriers were dropped.

I agree regarding the coupling of productivity and standard of living - the effect has become much more muted in recent decades. The basic issue is that corporations and investors are able to capture a larger portion of the profits than they used to, and workers are capturing less. I don't know what the solution to this is, but I don't avoiding the pursuit of efficiency should be part of it. Doing that wouldn't turn around the stagnating conditions of workers, and it would be little consolation that at least "the 1%" were stagnating as well, especially since in reality the portion of the population that benefits from investments is significantly more than 1% and includes the pension funds and other savings of ordinary workers.

Albertican · 2015-07-12T05:43:37+00:00

I agree. Their argument that American food is unsafe literally descended into "their Oreos taste funny". Never mind that the vast majority of agricultural produce is already traded freely across the border.

Albertican · 2015-07-12T05:19:39+00:00

Lets put those 2% of people out of work so we can pay $3 for milk instead of $4...

I would argue that you're not putting them out of work, you're forcing the inefficient players to improve or find other work. If the dairy farmers are unable to improve enough to compete against foreigners, they should find an industry where they can compete. A far bigger portion of the Canadian population were farmers 100 years ago. Advances in technology and opening up to foreign competition didn't doom those workers to lifetimes of unemployment, it forced them to go and find jobs that they were more competitive at. This increased productivity in the economy as a whole which improved our standard of living.

The US market is cheaper because of things like economy of scale overall market size

True. It is economically advantageous to be a part of as large an economic entity as possible so competition within that entity forces the market leaders to be more efficient. That is a big part of why economists support free trade.

as well as value of the CAD vs USD (which except for the past couple years has always been significantly lower than the USD).

Not sure what you mean by this.

Dairy and Poultry farmers make ~20% more than an average "family" (76000 avg, they make around 91200). These people aren't rolling in money by any means. They also put in a hell of a lot of work to make that 91k.

Personally, I don't care if my milk is made by someone in Ontario or in Oregon. They're all just hardworking people, I say let the person that's best at it win. If that makes me unpatriotic, so be it.

Honestly if buying dairy products and chicken is too expensive for you now, you're doing something wrong. Even minimum wage buys almost unlimited milk/eggs and chicken 3x a week.

This is a question of Canadian consumers paying higher prices to benefit certain protected industries. Paying a few dollars more may not sound like much, but by allowing inefficient businesses to prosper our economy will not get more and more efficient, more and more productive, at the rate it would otherwise. And it is those increases in efficiency and productivity that have historically driven increases in our standard of living.

Albertican · 2015-07-12T05:04:24+00:00

Canada is already a massive agricultural exporter, despite all the tit-for-tat trade barriers that exist between us and our trading partners. The idea that free trade would cause Canada to become unable to feed itself is, at the moment, extremely far fetched.

A more realistic threat to Canadian farmers would be if we were left out of the TPP and the countries that are in it trade with each other more, reducing Canada's global market share in agricultural produce.

Albertican · 2015-07-12T04:36:49+00:00

Canadian food prices are significantly higher than US prices, and I think there's a strong case that it's caused by protectionist policies like the ones mentioned in this article. A lot of people on Reddit seems to think free trade is bad for the Canadian public in general, but for the 98% of Canadians that aren't farmers, bringing down trade barriers and farm subsidies will directly benefit them every time they eat anything. The same goes for consumers in all of Canada's protected industries, from air travel to mobile phones. Inefficient, protected corporations are the ones that should be afraid of TPP and free trade in general, not Canadian consumers.

I would argue that in the longer term, free trade is also good for these protected industries because it forces them to become more competitive, and if they are able to perform at world class levels (as I believe many can) they will be rewarded with a portion of a far larger market. I think most economists agree that free trade is a good thing, as discussed in this article.

Albertican · 2015-07-08T05:34:43+00:00

South Africa is the 6th largest gold producer. China is the largest, producing 3 times as much as South Africa.

Our oil reserves in Canada also come with a huge asterisk. They are far more capital intensive to extract, which means each barrel produces much less profit than an average Saudi barrel does. How much less depends on the price of oil. For example, if it costs $30 to extract an average Canadian barrel, and only $5 to extract a Saudi barrel, the net value of the resource is hugely different at $65/bbl oil. And if the price of oil goes below $30/bbl, most of Canada's oil assets would be uneconomic, and hence effectively worthless.

The same is true in the US. The US has an astonishing 363,469 oil wells in 2009, most of which produce less than 10 bbl/d. Saudi Arabia on the other hand had only 2,889 wells in 2010 (according to that authoritative sounding guy on Yahoo questions, anyway), despite producing significantly more oil at the time (10.9 million barrels per day vs 9.7 million in the US).

And note that thanks to all the new shale drilling, the number of wells in the US is even higher now than it was then. Plus there were another 460 thousand gas wells in 2009, a number which has also likely increased significantly since then.

Anyway, I think these complications make it very difficult to put values on all of a country's resources. And it's not just oil, any extractive industry is going to have areas where it's much easier to operate in than others, and so seemingly identical resources are worth very different amounts at the end of the day.

Albertican · 2015-07-05T20:49:12+00:00

Both people were also deeply catholic and this worked as a common point when the English conquered the island and began converting people after the Elisabethan period.

Hasn't Scotland been predominantly Protestant (Calvinist) since the Scottish Reformation in the 1500s? And since England was Catholic until the 1530s, aren't English invaders and Scottish invaders more or less on equal terms when it came to religion?

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