Blessed by the Potato

So for those who haven’t heard, we’re having a little bit of a crisis of faith in our government here in the great white north. We just had an election, which returned Harper with a “strengthened minority” — but a minority nonetheless. There was no “message from Canadians” — our ballots are not that detailed. Nonetheless, I’ve seen Con pundits all over say that Harper has a “mandate” from Canadians and that the opposition parties attempting to form a coalition to govern in his place is “undemocratic”.

Of course, it’s nothing of the sort — the majority of people voted against Harper. He spent years trying to self-destruct parliament with brinksmanship and confidence measures. The message from Canadian voters if anything was “you can’t rule as though you had a majority; here’s another minority now go play nice with the other parties.” Then the first thing he does when he gets back is introduce a partisan fiscal update (that takes away a source of funding for smaller parties) and made it a confidence measure to try to bully it through (oh, it also takes away the right for public sector workers to strike and the right for women to sue for pay equity). So the opposition has indicated that it is prepared to call his bluff, and he throws a hissy fit and threatens to shutter parliament for over a month. Or, as explained over at Whatever by Leila:

“Stephen Harper is not being removed because he proposed to eliminate the $1.95/vote, although that was an underhanded tactic intended to cripple the opposition parties. He withdrew that proposition […] Stephen Harper is being removed because he seems to think that 143 seats and 37.6% of the popular vote is a mandate from Canadians to do whatever the hell he pleases. He has a minority government. As such, it is his responsibility to cooperate with the opposition parties. He refuses to do so. “

Yes, in the midst of the worst economic turmoil in a generation, he wants our government and our leaders to go take a little vacation. Maybe spending more and having economic stimuli and bailouts won’t save us. Maybe it will just create more government debt and make the hole even harder to dig out of — but he’s not even willing to discuss the issue. At a time when the worldwide markets are facing a crisis of confidence, Harper wants to show Canadians that the government is not just asleep at the wheel, it’s not even at the helm!

On top of all this has been the Harper-Flaherty boondoggle of the last few years: lying to Canadians (income trusts, the prospect of a deficit), fiscal mismanagement, politicizing everything, including the safety issues of an ageing nuclear reactor, and breaking their own fixed election date legislation because they were so desperate to get an election in ahead of this turmoil that they’ve long known was coming (but did nothing about).

In a word, the Cons have lost the confidence of parliament, and of Canadians. Having the other parties work together to come to a compromise position that everyone can agree to is democratic, and it’s how our system is supposed to work with minority governments.

Now, my dad is in a bit of a huff over all this — he doesn’t care who ends up in power, but we need some stability to restore confidence in the markets. The Bloc is going to support a coalition for 18 months, so that might be enough, whereas a continued Harper government could be back here again in a week (assuming it is allowed to carry on by some back-pedalling and compromising by the PM) because of just how unstable those personalities are. The market has been burned by Flaherty before: the surprise income trust tax, and two rounds of buying mortgages from banks (not quite a bailout, but close) when the banks didn’t really seem to need it (which actually hurt confidence a bit). Because of that, on a per capita basis, the bailouts in Canada have been almost as large as the ones in the States, and we’re just getting going with this party.

Some perspective is, of course, required. This is not really a “takeover” or a “crisis” — tanks are not going to roll up parliament hill. The MP you elected is still your representative in parliament. All that’s changed is that the majority of ABC MPs have decided to cooperate since the Cons won’t. It’s been pointed out that Stephan Dion and the Liberals will probably take a drubbing in the next election over this — 18 months away, if the Bloc are to be believed — and that’s probably true. For that reason I have to respect the man. He’s willing to take the hit to his own reputation and long-term outlook in order to step up and do what is right for Canada now. Hopefully the coalition will manage to fix the economy (and our environmental plan at the same time) and turn it around within the next year and a half and they’ll be vindicated. If not, at the very least the next Con government we face won’t have Harper (and hopefully not Flaherty either) at the helm; hopefully it’ll be a Progressive Conservative rather than a Reform/Con man.

Wow, in this day and age I would have thought people had figured out the whole mailing list thing. Apparently not, as evidenced by an absolute fiasco by the EMC 2009 organizers.

What’s EMC 2009? I haven’t the faintest bloody idea. They mysteriously sent out a notice to a bunch of scientists (myself included) that they had added us to their mailing list. They sent the notice twice: the first time encoded in Greek. They never said who they were, where they had harvested our email addresses from, or what the mailing list they had just signed us up for was all about. I’ve never heard of them, and I have no idea what they’re selling.

People who make mailing lists should know better in this day and age.

I immediately shit-canned them, and unsubscribed. The webpage was broken, with no information at all, and it was a secure site with its own non-standard security certificate. Firefox threw a hissy fit about the security risks. I let it do its thing “this time only” to unsubscribe, but I could totally see how someone who was less net savvy would be faced with the message:

“Page load error: lists.ntua.gr uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is not trusted.”

and not know how to unsubscribe. Plus we’re sometimes told not to click on those links in spam messages because all it does is confirm that the address is live, which just invites more spam. So then, en mass, the people who were unwillingly signed up for this mailing list started to send messages to the list saying “unsubscribe” “get me off this” “how do I get off this?”, etc. That, of course, did not help matters, and by now people who get signed up for mailing lists should know better. Word is that the traffic of furious unsubscribe messages reached 50 per day, clogging the mailboxes of scientists all over the world, and finally the list admin who started this mess had to step in and shut down the mailing list. She sent a really snarky email too, even to people like me who had unsubscribed already (I unsubscribed, why am I getting more crap from you morons!) lambasting the sheep for sending stupid messages to the list that clearly were unproductive and not getting them unsubscribed. I don’t know why she’s getting all uppity: yes, the lusers were being moronic, but that’s what end users do, even scientists (especially old scientists). She’s the one that caused all the pain to begin with via the completely unsolicited mailing list. It’s like those telemarketers who call and then act all put out and snotty when you actually answer the phone, and you’re just like “hey bitch, you phoned me!”

So, Irene Karanasiou, for you, here are the rules:

Well, the Halloween party is over and it went off fairly well. Our neighbours’ party was much bigger than ours, and lasted longer, too, but they managed to keep things fairly well under control — we could barely hear them inside in the room closest to their house, and not at all from the bedrooms; best of all, no broken glass in the parking lot! One issue though, was public urination. At least two guys came around the fence into our parking lot to pee, and were shameless about it. One guy I saw make a bee-line for the fence, and I shouted “hey, it’s not a washroom!” and he just bashfully waddled 3 steps away and then peed anyway. Another guy came over while we were out in the parking lot, and, came around the fence, looking right at us, went pee. He was seriously just two parking spaces away, something like 10 feet, peeing. And there were girls there.

Now, as those who know me well (I mean really well) know, I understand the urge to pee sometimes frequently. That panicked, painful need to pee, whether due to a small bladder, overactive kidneys, or both. There have been several times when I’ve been stuck in traffic or out on a walk and been sorely, sorely tempted to just go out in the wild. But I don’t, because I’m civilized; I hold it until a washroom is available, I try to plan ahead, and I buy a lot of donuts I don’t really want so I can use the Tim Horton’s without guilt. Somehow though, there are a large number of guys around here who just don’t seem to care at all. There are a few alleys down Richmond here (where all the bars and clubs are) where on a weekend, those alleys will reek of piss. Walking down at prime drunk time, you’ll almost invariably see someone there, peeing, in full view of all the people walking down the street (it’s an alley, not a stall). The sidewalk will be wet with this little river that mysteriously starts six feet down the alley, springing from an apparent leak in the wall.

What could possibly possess these people, in the age where we pick up after our dogs, to just urinate in public, and to do so with so little shame? For the Halloween example, these guys were at a party in a house, a house with washrooms — how long could the line up have possibly been? And how callous do you have to be to pee on the neighbours of your hosts? While they watch? Of course, Wayfare has told me that there are much worse things they could be doing, such as breaking bottles, or breaking into our house… but relativism doesn’t make the smell go away the next morning when I have to get my car (and having my house broken into was probably better than getting mugged, but it still fucking sucked).

I don’t think I’ll ever understand that mindset, one that I think goes along with breaking bottles in the street (and my parking lot) for no reason. I don’t think my lack of comprehension is in any way a bad thing, either, but aside from tasering wayward urinators, is there any way to keep them at bay?

Fear is the name of the game lately in the markets. I’m off in vacationland on dial-up, so I’m a little disconnected from everything, but I couldn’t help but check in on the markets the last two days, and it’s been pretty damned scary. Because of that, I couldn’t help but make a post.

Huge, dizzying drops in the stock market. I was in physiological shock (hyperventilating, cold sweats) at how bad the market was on Monday — I was really glad I slept in and only checked at the end, so at least it wasn’t as bad as it was briefly. Tuesday was another terrible day, bringing us back down about to where things stood briefly on Monday.

I’m sort of at a loss as to what to do. I can’t justify selling out — as much stress as it’s causing me, I figure this just means we’re closer to a bottom today than we were on Friday, and panic selling is rarely a winning strategy. There is a lot of fear out there; it’s looking like we’re in for a major recession rather than a brief correction. Credit is seriously tightening: TD is upping their mortgage/HELOC rates even though the prime rate hasn’t changed [before I got to publish this, the central banks lowered the bank rate by 0.5%, but TD only lowered prime by 0.25%]. But the market is the great pricing machine, and maybe that is now priced in to stocks.

There are a couple of huge losses on my screen right now: Priszm, the income trust that manages a number of Canadian KFC outlets, is down 71% for me (not counting distributions). Even after the distribution cut, it’s yielding 34.6%. I have to wonder if that just represents panic selling, or unloading of something under $3-5 to free up margin, or if they’re toast? Does someone out there know some bad news I don’t? Should I bail and at least get something from it? That’s a question I had to face last week when the clinical trial of a biotech start-up I invested in went poorly. The stock instantly went from $2 to $0.10 [and today to $0.04]. I thought very hard on selling out, looked at the balance sheet a few times (the liquidation value should be about $0.05/share), and decided to just sit tight in the very slim chance some good news came around, though that’s a very slim chance, especially since in this environment they can’t really raise money to have a second go at a clinical trial.

Oddly enough, I’m still fairly optimistic about the stock market in general. It’s probably not going to get better this week or this month, but just in case it does I threw another $200 into the TD e-series index funds today to average down into these prices. My dad, who maintained a bright outlook through the gloominess of the past year, finally seems to have lost his optimism this week. He thinks we’re in for a reinforcing downward spiral of margin calls and increased credit costs. He says if the banks won’t lend to each other, they won’t lend to anyone, and the whole economy is going to grind to a halt until this gets sorted out, and everyone is going to get mauled in the process. Even the Canadian Savings Bond program had to delay their issue this year because of the chaos in the credit market.

Interestingly, a friend just had their offer on a house accepted last week. The housing market scares me right now. The stock market is fast, and liquid, and dizzying. We just had a major crash, and could be in for more, but then it was hard to see coming, and should stabilize shortly. The housing market on the other hand is slow and pondersome, and you can just see the downturn coming from miles (years) away, and can’t do anything about it — you can’t even short a house or a condo as a hedge. As for my friend: well, she’s going into this with eyes open. She knows it’s a rough housing market, she knows my views on the matter, and she got 3% off asking, so that’s something. Plus she’s got to live her life, and doesn’t want to wait any longer. In what I consider a bizarre twist, my dad, who also thinks that “condos are going to be going for pennies on the dollar in 2010”, and who won’t touch a Canadian bank stock — not because of ABCP, but because of the trouble he thinks regular Canadian mortgages are in for — supported her decision.

“We bought our first house in late 1987,” he said, “right near the peak of the last boom. Our house was worth about half what we paid for it by 1990. Last year, just for shits and giggles, I asked a real estate agent friend what he thought we could get for it if we were to sell. He said we’d get about $1.2 million. This week, if I had to sell, I’d be lucky to get $600k. Sure, the listings are still way over that in this neighbourhood, but nobody can buy right now; there’s a good three dozen homes for sale that have been up since the new year, and only 3 that closed. If you need to move it, you’ve got to price it down, and the market is going to come down. But when you buy a house, none of that matters. Just look at us: we bought right at the peak, and just held on through down and up and down again over 20 years, and we’re still living there. The price of the house hasn’t affected us at all.”

Well, Wayfare just lapped that right up. She is, of course, beset with the worst kind of house lust and it also seemed to reassure our recent homeowner friends. Heck, maybe that’s exactly what it was designed to do — there’s no sense in panicking our friends when at this point there’s really not much they can do. I, of course, disagree with my dad. Overpaying for a house is something that follows you for almost the rest of your lives. Even if you never sell, if you pay 20% more for a house, then your mortgage payment will always be 20% more. That’s a big part of your household budget that could have gone to vacations or cars or early retirement. If your house goes down by 20% and you lose what equity you had built up, then you can’t get a HELOC to fund a roof repair or the Smith Maneouvre; if you do have to sell and move, then your equity is wiped out and you’ll have to pay extra for a CMHC high ratio mortgage on your next house. If you lose your job, you can’t necessarily count on selling the house to get back your equity if you don’t have any. It is, by it’s nature, a highly leveraged purchase. Buy into the troubled stock market at the wrong point and all you’ve lost is what you invested, but you could be in for more pain if that was a leveraged purchase.

So in addition to the general bubbliness of the housing market (high housing costs-to-rent costs and housing-to-income ratios), there are a number of other nasty factors like the tightening of lending standards (no more zero-down, 40 year mortgage people to feed the fire), increasing rates, decreasing credit availability, looming recession fears, and of course, the psychological effect of witnessing what’s happening in the States just below us even if we were completely economically isolated, that all come together to make me afraid of the downturn in real estate to come. And unlike the stock market, that doesn’t get priced in quickly; this could be a few years of pain ahead. Sellers can sit in their homes for a long time, refusing to sell (except for the very few who can’t), making prices sticky. The September numbers were just released, and the downturn has finally started picking up momentum, with a 6% decrease for Toronto.

Well, the officiant cancelled for our rehearsal tonight, which sucks because most of the point of the rehearsal is to go over the ceremony with the officiant and everyone there. We’re going to try to meet him right now to go over it just the three of us.

The stock market’s having another terrible day, with the TSX down about 5%. For most of this year I’ve managed to do slightly less bad than the market, and my thesis has been that when the market loses its head like this it’s the time for active management to have a shot at beating out indexing. Well, today I think my reversion to the mean kicked in, as I’m down 10% to the market’s 5%, which brings my year-to-date losses pretty much in line with the index.

My parents’ cat spent a while around 5 am howling for attention. He had food, he had litter, he just wanted someone to look at him. This serves to remind me how perfect my cat is: when she wants attention at 5 am, she jumps up in bed and purrs like a civilized kitty. Maybe I’ll sleep through it, maybe I’ll half wake up and pet her, but as long as she tried she seems content with her effort to disrupt my sleep, and quickly lets me go back to sleeping either way. Plus, purring is pleasant, whereas howling is not. This little shit is like an alarm clock that won’t turn off until you go kick him down the stairs pet his little head and tell him to shut the hell up. Throwing him in your kid sister’s bed works too.