The Penalty Box

I could spend hours just watching random TED talks and they’d be infinitely more fulfilling than any funny Youtube video posted on reddit. This TED talk is about photography and how changing the context of how a picture is presented can alter your memories or change what you believe to have happened. Pretty cool stuff. Check it out here. If you have any interest in law, you’ll definitely want to check out the second half of the presentation which talks about wrongful convictions.

If you ever hear anyone list the actual things they like about their job, chances are (assuming they like their job) money is not at the top of the list. It’s almost always something intrinsically motivating, something intangible. Perhaps your co-workers are pretty awesome, or your manager isn’t a dick. Maybe you find what you do incredibly fulfilling. I watched this TED Talk again for the third time and every time I wonder why more companies can’t understand this concept of intrinsic motivation. If your company understands this, you almost certainly work for a really awesome company.

Whales: the fat jerks of the sea.  Orcas are pretty damn awesome though (and a little scary too).

…you find out it gets much much worse. A while back, I wrote a post about how the housing market killed the economy. The podcast isn’t hosted there anymore, so here it is (it’s about 27 MB). If you haven’t already listened to it, you should. Alternatively, if you want to employ the Ostrich Algorithm, don’t read the rest of this post.

Usual web browsing got me to come across this article today. If you’re in tl;dr mode, essentially the banks were in such a hurry to package up bad mortgages and sell them as AAA investments on Wall Street that they lost or destroyed a lot of the original mortgage documents. In a last ditch effort to stave off foreclosure, some homeowners just said, “Show me the document that says I owe you money for this house.” Banks kinda went, “uhh…we’ll um…get back to you.” So instead of the banks pressuring the homeowner to foreclose and be out of house and home, the banks are now being pressured to renegotiate the mortgage.

MBAs mean jack when greed prevents you from making the most idiotic of business decisions.

Today I learned about contango, specifically, how it relates to the oil industry.  Currently, crude oil is trading at about $30ish a barrel, a far cry from the $147 a barrel it was last summer.  This has caused a few companies to hoard some oil.  Basically, there are people with lots of money who buy up a couple million barrels worth of oil at current prices, stick it on some super tanker that costs like $50,000 a day to rent/operate (plus extraneous costs like security to ward off pirates) and get some schmuck to sign a contract promising they’ll buy the oil in the short future (like 6 months or a year) at $55 a barrel.  Costs millions, but they make millions more.  Sounds dumb, right? Especially since we’ve seen nothing but downtrends for oil.  But there’s a giant trade in this stuff and big companies are hoarding oil to sell it later at a speculative cost.

It’s sort of like shorting the market, except with the risk of piracy and more complications with logistics.  You can make a ton more money though, but you also incur more risk (bigger the risk, bigger the gain and also bigger the loss).  Thing is, who would sign a deal to buy oil at more than $20 a barrel more than the current price? That means you expect some significant gain over $20 in the amount of time you signed the contract for.  When we’ve seen a $100 price drop in the per barrel of oil AND Texas is sitting on all this oil because of a drop in demand, plus all the political shifts to “go green” and all, I don’t really see who would sign such contracts.  But then, Wall Street lost like $7 trillion selling what was essentially fracking nothing (bad loans on no collateral ahoy) so I guess there’s really a buyer for anything, even if they have nothing to buy with.

The more I learn about the economy, the more I wonder if anyone knows what the hell they are doing.  Well, aside from the scammers.

Not that it makes any sense either. You can always count on politicians to make asses of themselves in some sort of misguided attempt to appear more righteous to the people they supposedly represent. Take Stephen Harper for example. He has pretty much called his opposition unpatriotic and treasonous for forming a coalition and cooperating with the Bloc.

Excuse me, Mr. Prime Minister, but your party has attempted this twice before in the last decade (I like how Stockwell Day denies it all when it’s his name on the bottom of one of those letters). You weren’t so quick to paint the separatists in a dark light then, were you? Nope, not when they were willing to help you topple the then-Liberal government. The NDP wasn’t so evilly socialist when they agreed with you, were they?

Despite the Conservative PR machine wants everyone to believe, what the Liberals, NDP and Bloc are doing is not illegal, it is not overturning an election and it is not treasonous. The purpose of them being able to do this is to be a check against a minority government. You don’t get along? Too bad, you have to, because you don’t have enough seats to have a majority to push through whatever you want. We elect Members of Parliament in Canada, not a Prime Minister. Whoever has the most seats gets to be in charge, whether that be a single party or a coalition.

Frankly, if the Conservatives were dumb enough to think they could get away with removing federal subsidies for political parties (which amounted to a measly $26 million, not much help when there are forcasted deficits of $8 freaking billion) and the right to strike from civic workers, they deserve to be kicked out. Tack on the pathetic lies to make the opposition look bad (yes they did have not one, but two Canadian flags, not none, when they signed the coalition agreement) and Jim Flaherty saying they made a “deal with the devil” (read: Hey Quebec, Gilles Duceppe is Satan! We don’t need your stinkin’ votes!), and it’s a wonder how they thought they could ever govern effectively. You can only be assholes to the other parties when you have majority. Ask the BC Liberals when they had a 77 to 2 advantage.

Harper’s attempt to destroy the opposition rather than focusing on stimulating the economy backfired, so now he’s doing everything to hold onto power. He’s got about as much chance of that as the Leafs winning the Cup this year. His only silver lining is that the forces opposing him have no hope of actually working together, coalition agreement notwithstanding, so he can stand up afterwards and smugly say, “I told you so.” The NDP is in bed with the unions while the Liberals are in bed with big business: not exactly two entities that work well together. Tack on a bunch of whiners who don’t have a bloody clue in the Bloc and you’ve got a recipe to make Parliament look as competent as the Bush administration. Not that the Conservatives were doing such a bangup job in the first place.
Either way, Canadians lose. They either get a bully who wants to rule govern with impunity or a lame duck who completely dropped the ball at the opportunity to seize more seats in an election and is dependent on the support of a single issue party. There is no easy solution nor is there a good solution. It’s gone too far for anything to work out, so here’s an idea: every tax paying Canadian gets to kick Dion and Harper in the balls. It won’t actually fix anything, but I’ll be damned if it wouldn’t make me feel just a little bit better.

PS: Kudos to Bishnu for giving me the photo.

Last year, I lamented that there was a distinct lack of people handing out poppies.  No stores I visited had poppy cans or trays.  This year I noticed quite a few stores with those familiar Legion cans, as well as a couple people handing out poppies.  Perhaps because it was the 90th anniversary of the First World War armistice, but it was good to see stuff like that coming back.
Watching a news story on the Highway of Heroes made me marvel at the human spirit.  The fact that it started without any fanfare or political push represents the best of this country when it’s the worst time for the family of the fallen.  It’s strange who we call heroes these days.  David Beckham was called a hero for scoring on a penalty kick.  So too was Jason Arnott, when he scored in overtime to win the Stanley Cup.  But when I gazed upon the only remaining Canadian soldier from World War I placing a rose at Victory Square, well, I think you know what I’m getting at.  We should all acknowledge the real heroes today.

This podcast has a fantastic discussion as to why the US economy (and by proxy, most of the economies of the world) are crappy at the moment.  It’s an explanation of how the American housing market went from “can’t lose investment” to “Forclosure City.”  It’s lengthy, but worth a listen even for the first 20 minutes or so.  Put it on your music player of choice and listen on the way to school/work.

Admittedly, it’s kind of depressing, but you’ll also probably WTF a few times at the atrocious business practice that was essentially a “keeping up with the Joneses” strategy.  It’s worse than the dot com VC funding extravaganza.