Random shortstuff : Price

Price Global

site name for a wild, wooly and wide portal
dealing with
the Price of various stuff.

The intangible, and the tangible.
The measurable, and the less so. 
The bits and the atoms.
The software and the hardware.
 Heck we'll even cover wetware.

What is the Price (in terms that mean something to you/
me)?
Who set that Price?
How flexible is the Price?
How close is it to FMV?

We'll consider the fundamentals,
perhaps starting with:
What does 'Price' mean?
How does one measure Price?

But throughout, regularly and entertaingly,
we'll tell you The Price of some Stuff.
eg.
eg.
eg.


Wide is the term we use for
the breadth of inquiry and explication.
We aim to be wide.😉

We will also strive to be Global,
in the literal and metaphoric senses both.
And look at the many connections and disconnects between Price and Cost.

We want to be 'participatory'.
Meaning reaching out to the folks who really know about Price,
the people who set it,
the people who pay it,
those who compare Prices.

We'll reach out to the 'experts',
whether on some esoteric, and interesting specific, [ the price of rice in China ]
or the grand schemes, and cartels [OPEC].

We want to explore with you and those in the know,
all aspects of Price,
in a way that engages you, entertains you, educates you.

Y'all come back, y'hear...

My Relations, Your Relations

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Let's start with the thesis.
We are all related.
Here is some (hopefully straightforward) proof, using math.

But first, a couple of things you need to know, and believe.
- the two times table
- a crude sense of the world's population growth over the last few thousand years.

The 2 times table is easy with single digits. 2 x 8 =16 sort of thing.
It is not that difficult with more digits, 2 x 512 = 1024
You get the idea.

Next, World population growth over the last 2000 years - say since the time of the historical Jesus - may be seen at a chart here...
http://www.ecology.com/population-estimates-year-2050/
For our purposes, a key figure is that in year 1250 AD,  the high estimate for the world's population is 450 million people. And that figure has been growing steadily ever since. Now we are almost at 7.5 billion folks, or 7,500 million people.

OK, so much for background.
Now you need to consider your own ancestral lines. In numerical terms.
1 generation back - you had 2 parents.
2 generations back you had 4 grandparents (typically).
3 generations back 8 great grandparents.
4 generations back 16 great great grandparents.
The pattern may be obvious.
The number of direct lineal ancestors grows x 2 with each preceding generation (going back in time).

Now a generation is usually 25 years or less.
So if we imagine going back 750 years about, to 1235 AD, that would be going back 30 generations.

Now all we have to do is multiply 2 30 times to find out how many direct lineal ancestors that would be. 2 x 2 x 2 x2 x2 x2 x2 etc. 30 times.
Fortunately most smart phones have a calculator that can do this with a few keystrokes.
Drum roll...
And the answer is 1,073,741,824.
That's 1 billion, 73 million, 741 thousand, 824    great to the 28th ancestors.

Hold on a sec.
This does not compute.
How could you have over a billion (1,000 million) ancestors in the year 1250, if the total number of people in the world was only 450 million?
Say that is a good question.
Well, the answer has something to do with a paradox labelled the Pedigree Collapse.
In turn the answer is inbreeding. People mating with their own ancestral line.

But the core idea is still alive.
Going 30 generations back, I too, would conceptually have a billion direct ancestors.
And if there were only 450 million people around then, the overwhelming proportion of them  were likely related to me.
And without putting too fine a point on it, these are the same 450 million ancestors from that time who are your direct lineal ancestors.

Kinda mind blowing.
The take-away:
We're all related.

Building Controls: Farce or Scandal

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A simple, sensible project to improve safety at my house has turned into a frustrating fiasco.
Blame the municipal Building Controls department, and the regulatory regime that they insist governs their conduct.

Here's a quick recap of where things stand.
The plan was uncomplicated. Create a new entrance/exit for the basement of my home. This was because there was only a single way in or out of the large basement, a not very convenient one at that.
In the unhappy event of a fire downstairs, the single exit path could have been easily blocked. A second way out would be a big safety upgrade.

Because the bottom half the lower level was below the natural ground level, a small landing had to be excavated outside the door. The landing would be surrounded by a 3 sided retaining wall, with a set of 4 steps from the landing to ground level.

I knew that the project would require a building permit to comply with the rules. The rules of course are complicated. Very complicated. Too complicated I say. Kafkaesque. But I was committed to do this by the book.

I hired an architectural technologist with BCIN credentials to design the entrance way and landing. For $600. +hst Dan created the digital plan with specs, and gave it his stamp. I brought it to City Hall to get a building permit. There I got grief. Dozens of questions were asked, many of them irrelevant and outside the scope of their concerns. I cooperated best I could.

That session ended without a permit. The inspector I spoke to determined I would require a structural engineer to review the project, and give it an engineer's stamp. This would be another $500. +hst.

Eventually the permit was issued, with all sorts of red ink stamped cautions and additional specifications defacing the drawings.

The work got done at serious expense to me.

Then I called for a final inspection. Turns out a few years back I had met the inspector in connection with a client file. I ended up bringing a legal action against that inspector and Building Controls. (The gist of our complaint then was that an inspection order had been prepared evicting my client and shutting down the job - even though it was admitted no inspection had taken place.) He remembered me. Darn.

Of course my new entrance way job did not pass muster.
And now I must incur further effort, with delays, and more cost.
The system is flawed, and somewhat corrupt. It is sad.

What to do?
Option One: keep head low, keep on plugging, submit to the arbirtary lunacy, and move on.
Option Two: stand up for what is right, and press for justice, for me and others in this situation.

Sure, I know the aphorism: You can't or shouldn't swing at every pitch. One has to pick one's battles.
But geez, this is a tough call to make.

More later...

PART 2
The Zoning Bylaw Fiasco
first draft 2017.08.07

This piece is about Sudbury's Zoning Bylaw.
It drives me almost crazy thinking about it, or reading it, or searching it.
Honest to goodness, I believe it is just so wrong, and so misguided.

I believe sincerely that if the voters in our community, the citizens, the people,
had an opportunity from scratch to consider all of this bylaw,
(first having been schooled in a neutral way about it, in all its complexity)
and having had the opportunity to consider sensible proponents and opponents for it in an open debate,
that the bylaw would fail to pass on a referendum vote,
and further that large parts of it would be excised or simply cut out,
or at a minimum, massively simplified.

I believe this would also be true for our municipal councilors.
(And as an aside, I would wager a day's pay or more, that not one current councilor of this community, has taken the time or trouble to read, with a view to trying to understand, the whole of the document - which they voted to make the law of our community. Sad.)

It bears noting here that Sudbury is quite typical of other communities in its zoning bylaws.
Indeed they all come from the same template.
And for the record, there is not the talent or the available municipal resources in a community like ours to draft such a law without the a template being followed.

How then did the last zoning bylaw of 2010 pass?
Well, by a series of realities and also strategems.
First there is no organized opposition.
Second the proponents are paid, full time municipal employees or others who have a vested interest in the document. This is their life, their job, their raison d'etre.
Third, the 2010 bylaw did not start from scratch, but was promoted as a modest revision or updating to the prior bylaw, which in turn arose from a series of a dozen bylaws that preceded it.
Each of those earlier versions of course was a little simpler, a little less complex, a little less draconian.
And fourth, the bylaw is but one of a hundred similar bylaws in other communities, initially generated in a community much bigger and more complex than our own. Sudbury is just following the provincial trend and pattern.
And fifth, it is so egregiously complicated that it is not reasonable to expect that ordinary folks ( by which I mean those who do not make a study of these things their life's work) can mount a sensible challenge to the promoters of the zoning bylaws.

What are the consequences of an overly complex, overly restrictive, tough to understand zoning bylaw? (Aside from pissing me off.)
1. It transfers power to bureaucrats - the planners, the administrators, or their counterparts in private industry, who work for a fee.
2. It stifles innovation and progress.
3. It unduly infringes on what otherwise would be sensible property rights of land owners.
4. It causes disrespect for the rule of law.
5. And importantly it adds huge and unnecessary costs to ordinary land users (owners and tenants) and citizens and for that matter visitors. Everything is much more expensive than it ought to be.

There are probably other negative consequences, but these 5 are what came to mind just off the top.
It's quite an indictment in any case, if you ask me.

Do you think I'm crazy?
Before you settle on such a conclusion, pray Just give the Bylaw a read.
It's online.
Which is mostly a blessing - though being online is to my mind a contributing factor to its girth and craziness.

As a challenge consider a simple question about a proposed land use on a particular property and whether or not the proposed use complies with the zoning bylaw.

Litigation Costs - some perspective

From today's Globe and Mail a couple of fascinating stats about the cost to companies for legal services.
The piece by J. Stempel out of NYCNY for Reuters comments on the recent settlement of an investors lawsuit against global banking giant Deutsche Bank AG.

DB agreed to settle a case where bank people manipulated certain data (European Interbank Offered Rate - Euribor).
The Bank agreed to pay $220 million (Cdn) to the investors. $220,000,000.00
Sounds like a lot of money.

And maybe it is.
But compared to the costs the Bank has incurred over the years for legal bills, well, maybe not so much.

It is also reported that DB has paid $220 billion in legal costs for the period 2009-2016. (explanatory note below)

Which means the settlement amount that went to the injured folks was 1/10th of 1 percent of their legal bills for the last 8 years. A pittance really.

What's amazing is the cost to the Bank of legal services.
On average, roughly $27 billion, with a B, per year.
Now that's a lot of money.

After some further checking online:
When DNB speaks of "legal costs" I now understand that to mean the cost of settling court cases, which involves a lot more than simply legal fees. It includes payments to the folks who complained.

There is available from other sources, info on the amount the Bank has paid in 'Legal Fees' in certain periods. So for 2015, if memory serves, the Bank paid about $300 million in legal fees. That year it had 6,000 cases in the system, 1,000 of which involved claims over $100,000. 
Still very serious money. 

Laws, by the Numbers

This is a post for all of those who at sometime or another have wondered:
How many laws are on the books that govern what I do?
Wonder no more.
For Canadians, living in Ontario, the answer is 175,650 laws on the books as at Dec. 31, 2015.

One hundred and seventy five thousand + laws,  is a big number of laws. Huge, really.

If you had that many loonies (Canadian dollar coins), and you carefully stacked them one on top of another, they would reach 1,125 feet into the sky. Just a few feet short of Sudbury's Superstack which is 1,250 feet high. (a loonie is 1.95 millimeters thick)

What is as noteworthy as the size of the number of laws, is that until quite recently, no one really knew how many laws we had. No one had ever bothered to count before. Hard to believe, but true.

In a moment I'll come back to some of the reasons no one had counted before, and some of the challenges in doing the counting. But first a few words about why it is good to finally get a law count.

Here are my top 5 reasons for saying a count of laws is a good thing.

1. it is a principle of our legal system that citizens are expected to know the laws that are in place. "Ignorance of the law" is not an excuse or defense to breaking a law. Having a count of the laws gives you a sense of the challenge you face in not being ignorant.
2. at some number, (and let there be a debate about what that number might be), there are simply too many laws for ordinary citizens to come to grips with. But if one does not have a count of the laws the discussion becomes rather meaningless.
3. if we know the number of laws at a given point in time, we can get other numbers for other points in time. Then we will know if the number of laws is holding stable, or decreasing or more probably, growing. 
4. we can compare ourselves with other jurisdictions along the dimension of how many laws each place has. We might find some interesting relationships between the number of laws in a place and the characteristics of the place. 
5. you can't manage what you don't measure.

Does it strike you that 175,000 or more laws is too many?
If so, do you not wonder how the heck we got to this number?

It was only about 3 and a half millennia  ago, around the time of Moses of the Old Testament, that their society only had 10 laws on the books - or clay tablets as the case may be. You will have heard of these as the 10 Commandments. Now that is a manageable number. Shucks, a regular person could commit all of them to memory.

Actually, a couple of hundred years before Moses, in the region of Mesopotamia, in the Kingdom of Babylon, society was ruled by the Code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi was the King. He enacted this set of laws, and had them recorded on clay tablets and stone slabs (stele) for all to see. The most prominent stele ever discovered is on display at the Louvre in Paris today. And the number of laws in the Hammurabic Code: 282.

These 282 laws were set out in 44 columns, and comprised only 28 paragraphs. They covered contracts and commercial transactions, crimes, and family law. Here one finds the first written example of the law which suggested the punishment of "an eye for an eye". Simple. Easy to remember. And I dare say, effective.

Meanwhile, back here at the ranch, we have so darn many laws that the lawmakers discontinued putting them on paper, or in books. I'm not making this up. Consider the situation for Ontario and its laws.

Through the 1900's, about every 10 years the government would get the Queen's Printer to publish a set of Ontario's laws. The last of these was the Revised Statutes of Ontario, 1990. I have a set. It consists of  12 thick volumes, plus an index volume, with hard covers, labelled on the spine. It takes up about a meter of shelf space, and weigh in at about 25 kilos. Every public library in the province, and nearly every law office had a set at the ready. These were the go to books for Ontario statute law. They are not only out of print, they are now more than 25 years out of date. And necessarily out of utility, save for historical research.

Let me give an example of a rather typical Ontario statute. The Anatomy Act. Which, until a few minutes ago I had never heard about (obviously subject to the imperfections of my recollections).
For sure this Act was passed by a majority of the then sitting, and in attendance, Members of Provincial Parliament some years back. And from a government operated web site (e-laws Ontario) I ca confirm that it is still 'on the books' - but not literally these days, just figuratively.

This Act opens with a fewer than a dozen definitions.

Regs


Building Code
But no more

The Skinny on Climate Change

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'Climate Change'.
Two simple words, easy to say, each well-used alone, yet remarkably mischievous in this present time - the  twenty mid teens.
For some, too many in my view, it is a battle cry or a call to arms. Regrettable really.
For a smaller group, but just as misguided, it announces a conspiracy of pinkos, intent on a grander revolution along socio-economic lines.
An inbetween group hears it as a cacaphony of voices, claiming a unison that never materializes. These folk are open to staying alert, but have trouble embracing forecasts of doom that may only affect their grandchildren or later issue.

The greater part of the mischief of this phrase arises from a lack of consensus about what the phrase encompasses or signifies. I can't help thinking that depending on what camp one is in, "climate change" can imply a little or a lot.

Knowing what someone means / implies by the phrase, is critical to a sensible conversation with that person.
At a minimum, the phrase means that the planet has experienced (in the last 20 to 200 years), and is likely to experience, a modest change in average temperatures, and it may even be said to imply that  the planet has experienced and will experience a greater than usual number of adverse or extreme weather events.

At the other end of the spectrum, some believe that the phrase embraces a large catalogue of scientific 'truths' (that explain what the changes are and why they are happening - with an emphasis on human caused reasons), and further what changes will occur in the near and medium terms under different policy options, and the essential governmental policies and individual actions that are needed to forestall imminent disasters. It is this group that I do not agree with. And I note that it is near impossible to reconcile the differing explanations, forecasts & prescriptions which different subgroups within this category advance. They are not all on the same page, though rarely will any acknowledge this.

Good Climate Change
Most folk speak about climate change in the same fashion as speaking about 'child molestation'. By this I mean that the phenomena is wholly bad. It does not have and can not have any socially redeeming value is a common refrain. This is unfortunate.
From my perspective and home, I am not willing to embrace the notion that a warmer Sudbury is altogether bad. I kind of imagine it would be quite OK. Heck it might even be wonderful.
A longer growing season: good. Less snow to shovel: good. Improved road conditions: good. Lower heating bills: good. More time to swim in our lakes: good. Fewer deaths from hypothermia: good. Is there something I am missing here?

The Distribution of Power

Power, power, who has the power?

One may be forgiven for thinking that power is quite centralized in particular individuals.
The presidential election in the US of A in 2016, with its wall to wall media coverage, seemed to deliver that message. The theme was simply that the person elected as president would be the most powerful person on the planet.

And when D. Trump took office, and even in the days just before that, the impression was that Trump would exercise that power in a singular fashion, as if his powers were absolute, at least in respect of affairs of the national state.

The attentive masses, those large numbers paying some attention to the affairs of the US, soon began to see that there were all sorts of possible constraints on the Presidential power. For many it was an education. For some it was just a refresher course in civics.

Consider one of the first Presidential acts of the Trump. An "executive order" concerning a travel ban on certain individuals - in part focused on restricting entry to the US by people from 7 countries with large Muslim populations.

No sooner that the Order was signed, the challenges started pressing in. The State of Washington was out of the blocks first. They challenged the Order in the Courts. And now it appeared that some federally appointed judge would have the power to determine whether the Order was legit, and whether it could be enforced.In short, that Judge now seemed to have 'the power'.

The tussle for power in this US context has been playing out continuously since. Of course, it has always been playing out since the creation of the US of A. But now, the drama seemed more public.

More recently, as the office of the President has taken some hits on the this struggle for power, the President's team has been crying foul about the antics of some critics of the President. This concerns information "leaks". That is the improper and probably illegal disclosure of confidential information that is undermining the President.

Leaks are not a new phenomena. But it is interesting to observe the hypocritical nature of the responses from the key players. Those who used to be in power, and used to be up in arms against leakers, now welcomed the leaks. And vice versa of course - those who used to welcome leaks (and coincidentally were out not in power) now were loudly complaining about the leaks.

My main point is this: the leakers have power. Serious power to change the agenda of discussion, and the outcomes of those discussions.

In others words, real power is very widely distributed. One does not need a fancy title, or an obscene bank account, or a high placed posting, to have power. Some mail room clerk may hold real power - in some narrow respect.

It has always been this way. And frequently folks forget this important insight. But it will do us all well to keep this point in mind, because it will always be this way.