Bruce Guenter's Thoughts

This is remaining open to scrutiny?

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:38:37 GMT

The StarPhoenix editorial entitled "Remaining open to scrutiny keeps science credible", says that "Skepticism and criticism is the way science grows."

Am I the only one that finds it beyond ironic that the same article labels those would scrutinize climate science reports as "denying climate change"?

The thing about creating jobs

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:35:31 GMT

Just the other day, a so-called economist from one of our big five banks was indicating he now estimated there would be 100,000 jobs created in 2010. Well, I'm starting to get a little irked with this notion of "job creation".

Would you say this survey is good, poor, or ...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:11:25 GMT

So, I'm on a couple of survey panels, and sometimes the questions leave me scratching my head how I can possibly answer them accurately. Particularly the political ones.

Today, a survey asks me: "Thinking about Saskatchewan, would you say these services are good or poor? Lottery and gaming..."

Well, I think the government is way overinvolved in lottery and gaming (and most if not all other services too). So, that would rate as "very poor". However, that would most likely be interpreted as meaning as wanting more government involvement in lottery and gaming. So then I should answer "very good". But it isn't very good.

Argh!

Voting Grumpy

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:14:30 GMT

In a week, our city will have held their triennial elections. In preparation, the city has mailed out pamphlets saying that "YOUR VOTE COUNTS". Unfortunately, I don't see any way to make my vote count the way I want it to.

I don't trust any of the candidates, either for my region or for mayor, to make even a majority of decisions that I agree with. The incumbents have proven otherwise, and the platforms of the challengers are worse. So what's a voter to do?

If there ever was, there no longer appears to be any way of indicating a vote of "no confidence" in the candidates. If there was, I would use this without question.

I can boycott the election, stay home, and have my vote is counted with the apathetic.

I can vote for nobody, spoil my ballot, and have my vote is counted with the incompetent.

Or, I can hold my nose, and tick the box next to the candidate that I think is going to make things worse the slowest. That's hardly the most appealing choice.

There really seems to be no wholly positive answer to what to do with elections.

Unbridled and Unregulated Capitalism?

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:09:10 GMT

I am fed up with people repeating the meme that the current financial problems have been caused by "unbridled" or "unregulated" capitalism. See here, here, here, and here for just a few such articles, which are repeated ad nauseum in comments all over the place.

Oh, please! This is complete and unvarnished baloney.

North America, and the USA in particular, has not seen anything resembling unregulated capitalism in at least 100 years, if ever. Truely unbridled or unregulated capitalism would have no rules imposed on it by the government, but I doubt that has ever been true anywhere in the world.

The USA has minimum wage laws, public services, zoning laws, the Federal Reserve System, the FDA, the EPA, the USDA, the TTB, Fair Housing, the FDIC, the FTC, and many, many more.

Leave aside for a moment the arguments over whether or not these rules are beneficial or not. With all these thousands of pages of regulations prescribing what businesses must and must not do, added to many government sponsored entities adding false competition to the economy, it is far from the truth that North America is experiencing "unregulated" anything.

Please stop this myth!

Fun with misleading statistics

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:43:09 GMT

An article on CTV.ca today warns that "One-fifth of childhood injuries happen at school". Because of this, they recommend that "more adult supervision may be needed".

While I don't disagree that adult supervision is necessarily a bad thing, let's look at the reality of the numbers.

In Saskatoon at least, children attend school from 9:00AM until 3:30AM. Many also play before and after school, but let's assume they don't. That amounts to 6.5 hours per day, 5 days a week, for a total of 32.5 hours a week at school. There are a total of 168 hours in a week. Do the math, and that means children are at school for 19.3% of the time, or just under one-fifth, in total.

But it gets better. Let's assume the children get eight hours of sleep per day. This will vary, of course, but it's probably a good lower estimate when considering that the younger children sometimes get much more. This adds up to 56 hours a week. Assuming the childhood injuries reported in the article only happen when the children are awake, this leaves 112 hours a week during which the injuries can occur. Of those hours, children spend about 30% of their time at school.

Now also consider that schools have both organized physical activity programs (aka gym class), and unorganized physical activity (recesses). Both of these will necessarily increase the risk for injury, as physical activity is a basic necessary precondition for being injured. On the other hand, while at home some do very little activity that could result in injuries. Those that are active, are frequently in organized sports of various kinds, which help train children in different ways to be active without injury. Actually, being inactive at home probably increases the risk of injury at school, but I have no numbers to back that up.

Given the reality of the statistics, and the physical conditions, I don't find any particular cause for alarm in this "one-fifth" number. If anything, our children are overprotected already -- not necessarily at school, but all over.

Spending or saving?

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:44:51 GMT

I don't get it.

We have been told for years if not decades how North America has a minuscule savings rate. How we aren't saving enough. Worse than that, the savings rate is dropping, and has now reached zero or even negative savings in places (meaning that as a whole the group is spending more than it is earning). How this will cause financial problems in the future if the trend is not reversed.

NOW that the predicted financial problems are starting to show, now we are being told we need to spend even more. Not only that, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada are dropping their interest rates into uncharted low territories to induce people to take out loans to spend more.

If a lack of savings was bad, how is this making it better and not worse? Sure, in the short term it means we're spending more money, but in the long term it will make recovery even harder and more painful.

Bitter economic lessons still not learned

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:31:15 GMT

In an article entitled "Bitter economic lessons learned" (Saskatoon StarPhoenix Friday November 28, 2008), Joe Jeerakathil writes regarding the current economic downturn:

The ascendant market fundamentalism, which upheld religiously that an unfettered market left to its own devices will offer the best path to economic nirvana, became the gospel of the Reagan revolution. Uncritical embracing of this orthodoxy led U.S. lawmakers to loosen the role of regulatory bodies in the pretext of promoting easier flow of capital. Wall Street enjoyed a free hand. The result has been the current mess. ... [Economists Keynes and Galbraith] warned the world about the endemic instability of the free market system with its cyclical swings.

Whoah. Not so fast there. Since when has Wall Street enjoyed a truly free hand?

As said in the article, a good deal of the current market troubles are a result of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage markets. The whole sub-prime mortgage market was created by government telling banks that they must make loans into situations where it did not make economic sense. Then the government told the banks how to package up these sub-prime mortgages into packages with other loans and sell them on the market as if they were high-quality investments. One recent loosening of the regulations on US banks has been widely hailed as reducing the severity of this collapse, even by those who initially opposed it.

Another part of the market troubles come from an artificially low interest rate set by the Federal Reserve. With the interest rate being set for long periods of time lower than
the inflation rate, the fed was effectively giving away money. This has the effect of completely skewing long-term investment and purchasing decisions, leading to overconsumption and excessive debt, both personal and corporate. The cyclical swings cited in the article are a result of the Federal Reserve setting the interest rate different than the natural interest rate.

To paint these problems as a result of a supposedly unfettered free market is extraordinarily misleading.

(If anybody can find an URL that includes the above article, I would be grateful. It is not on the StarPhoenix's web site with most of the other content from Friday's paper.)

Imbalanced Balance

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:30:06 GMT

Many times, when political issues are discussed in the news, you will hear politicians and pundits declare that they are seeking to find a balance in resolving the issue.

This is complete whitewash.

Invariably, the two "sides" to the issue that are presented involve doing little on one side, and doing too much on the other. Notice I didn't say doing "too little". When government decides to change their involvement in an issue, it's normally a question of how much more they are going to do. Doing nothing is effectively never even put up for discussion.

Given how much the state is involved in nearly every issue, the idea of it doing less should be up for discussion. However, heaven forbid any politician should ever bring that up. It's practically a political death sentence, for all but a small minority.

So, when the balance being sought is between doing a little and doing a lot, be sure that no matter what kind of balance is struck, the state will be larger than before. This can mean a number of things, but it usually involves more bureauracy, more laws, and more police or more policing in one way or another.

It also means more taxes. More of your money getting sucked away from productive measures to satisfy those bureaucrats who have a burning desire to be seen as "doing something"... and it's your money their desire is burning.

This is somewhat like the negotiation strategy of demanding far more than you really want to get, knowing full well that the other side will be forced to negotiate down to somewhere in the middle anyways. The difference in this case is that no matter what they ask for, it will be more than before, and any illusion of a balance between two sides is just that -- an illusion.

Parade Encounter

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 12:56:33 GMT

While watching this year's Santa Clause parade in our city, I found myself surrounded by a variety of people, as can be expected at this sort of event. Our daughters were performing baton twirling in the parade, so we were there as proud parents to cheer them on and take photos.

The city government ran an entry in the parade consisting of a car with the mayor's name on it and the mayor himself walking behind it waving at the crowd. Later, the local members of the provincial government ran an entry in the parade, which similarly consisted of a couple cars with the MLA's names on them, and one of the MLAs walking behind it. It sounds pretty boring, and it was, but what else would you really expect?

When the mayor's car inched past, I heard generally nothing from the people around me, other than the normal crowd noise, a little cheering, and maybe somebody giving recognition that they knew who it was. When the provincial government car inched past, the man beside me all but spat on the ground in his disgust, using words like "unbelieveble", "that gang" etc. He sounded both disgusted and genuinely surprised that these politicians would want to show their faces in public.

OK, I get that you didn't vote for the current political leaders. I can't say I agree with everything they've done neither. I am however astonished at the level of hostility that was expressed there. What's the deal? Is it normal to villify those who differ in their poitics?

What is doubly surprising to me is the difference in the reception of the two government floats. They are both politicians, just at different levels. Both our mayor and the province's governing party are considered to be "right wing" in their ideologies. Both have passed some bills that have benefitted businesses, and given preferential treatment. So why the indifference to one and disgust for the other?