Blessed by the Potato

There was a recent CBC Marketplace episode on homeopathy, in particular, the bizarre decision by the Ontario government to regulate some homeopathic preparations. I have to agree with the hosts of the show that this is a dangerous move by the government, as it may lend credibility to a practice that is void of any evidence of efficacy. For those unaware of what homeopathy is, it’s an old belief that if an agent does something (e.g.: arsenic is a poison that can lead to gastrointestinal and liver issues), then a dilute solution of that something does the opposite (e.g.: a homeopathic preparation of diluted arsenic is given for gastrointestinal issues). However, homeopathy has never been shown to do anything, and the theory and dilutions were developed before key advances in our understanding of molecular chemistry: many homeopathic tinctures are diluted so much they contain zero molecules of the supposed original substance. I had long heard about British evidence-based medicine, skeptics, and science advocates in general battling against homeopaths in the UK, but this Marketplace episode was the first time I found out that there was any homeopathic activity here in Canada. I found that surprising, as unlike other controversial alternative therapies (e.g.: herbal/”natural”, high-dose vitamins, chiropractic), homeopathy is a whole new level of nonsense. There’s literally no there there. It’s not that the evidence is weak, it’s that there’s no evidence, and no rational theory suggesting any efficacy. Homeopathy is completely, utterly, without merit.

I wrote to my MPP & Minister of Health and Long-Term Care Deb Matthews with one simple question: is this a program that is a cost centre for the government, or does it generate revenue by charging fees to the homeopaths? This is a relevant question, as we must control health care costs in our province, and we can not afford to waste money “regulating” sugar water.

I hope that the government is at least making money off the attempt, because I do believe that certifying in any way a homeopathic preparation does, in the eyes of the lay public, lend an air of credibility to the woo-woo. It’s been over a month, and I haven’t heard back on that yet. I got a response from one of her staffers that I would hear back later, but after several weeks with no response I re-sent my question. It’s been another few weeks and still no response.

“Dr. Joshua Tepper: People are choosing health care, people are voting with their feet, if you will.”

You know what else people are voting with their feet for? Marijuana. People who know me know that I am not a user. I despise the weed, and don’t think really it should be legalized (though to be fair, cigarettes should be criminalized). But you know what? I bet that there are way more users of pot than there are of homeopathy in Ontario. And there is much better evidence that pot might actually help a few medical conditions! So I don’t see any reason for this kind of “voting with their feet” logic for homeopathy but not for marijuana.

Something else millions of Ontarians are voting with their feet for is vision and dental care. The government’s never paid for dental care, and cut regular eye check-ups out of OHIP coverage years ago, yet somehow has the money and energy to worry itself about homeopathy?

Ugh.

I’m pretty miserably sick here. Sore throat, cough, fever, and vile fluids being produced all over the place. I think the combination of thesis stress and digging out from over a meter of snow just did me in.

My cache of drugs was pretty low to be heading in to a major illness. In particular, I was just about out of advil; I had to ration them yesterday so that I’d still have one to take this morning to get me out the door to the pharmacy.

On the bright side, I was going through the Pharma Plus flyer, and just about everything I wanted was on sale. Advil, vitamins, mouthwash, nyquil, and cold-fx all had pretty substantial sales on. Plus, it was a big bonus airmiles promotion if I spent $50 or more (which wouldn’t be hard to hit with all the stuff on my list). There was even a 1-day sale on 7-up ($2.22 per 6-pack of bottles! awesome!) today. I didn’t feel like driving, especially since we got another dusting of snow last night, and that would involve sweeping the car off. The Pharma Plus is only like 3 blocks away, so I walked.

And when I got there, there was no sale tag out for the Advil, just one of the “switch to the store brand and save X” tags. I figured I must have remembered the flyer wrong, put some store brand ibuprofen in the cart, and moved on… but the vitamins had no sale tag either. Nor did the mouthwash. The toblerone did, but not the door-crasher one-day sale price, and the 7-up wasn’t even available in the bottles. Something was definitely wrong, so I went to the front of the store where the flyers usually are to double-check (maybe I had the effective day wrong? Maybe I dreamed it all in my fever?), and there were no flyers. There wasn’t even that tray where they usually sit. I asked the cashier for a flyer, and he said they’re not a flyer store.

What? I know they were a flyer store just a few months ago, the last time I was there. How can they not be a flyer store? Can they do that, opt to use the Pharma Plus name and everything but then not follow their flyer? And also, if they’re not a flyer store, why is Pharma Plus sending a flyer to my house? The next closest store is 4 km away, and I have to pass by three Shoppers Drug Marts (and this Pharma Plus) to get there. Not a very effective use of the advertising budget…

I have to say though that given the amount of snow that was dumped on London, the city has done a decent job at cleaning up the sidewalks. This is particularly remarkable because the city usually does a terrible job at keeping the sidewalks free of snow — the sidewalk ploughs seem to take a day or two before they come around, and by that time the snow has been packed down into an irregular icy surface by the passage of what pedestrians there are, and that’s nigh-impossible to walk on. The one issue is that at many intersections the sidewalk ploughs went by first, and now the street ploughs have put up an icy barrier for pedestrians to hop over. Nothing new to anyone out there, I’m sure, but with the amount of snow we have, those ice dams mean that we’re going to have some epic meltwater ponds forming soon…

It’s my 800th post! I was trying to think of ways of celebrating this arbitrary milestone, but they all involved the chocolate bar sale at RCSS this week, which means I don’t have very good news for my diet update this week. Well, actually, it’s not all bad. I’ve been much better about my regular meals, even having salad for lunch, much to the very vocal shock and surprise of my coworkers. It’s just that I’ve also been grinding away at analysis for 10-12 hours a day for the last two weeks or so, and that has involved a lot of snacking. Worse yet, I haven’t done much at all in the way of exercise through all this, and the weather’s not getting any better.

The housing bubble seemed to crack into the media’s attention this week, with numerous stories on the matter, thanks in part to some attention from reports from CCPA, Howe, the OECD, and TD.

One important distinction to make is that the US was not the only country to have a housing bubble collapse in the last few years: most of Europe did as well. So if some analyst lays out the reasons why we won’t have a “US-style collapse” here, well, that’s just playing with semantics. We could have a UK-style collapse. Or a Spanish one. Or our very own flavour. Yes, due to how our lending is set up we’re less likely to have “waves” of defaults, but that’s a fine point. The housing market in the US was not hunky-dory save for the defaults (and we didn’t really see them in our 1989 crash either). The fact is that housing is too expensive, and it will come down. There’s still plenty of debate about how quickly that will happen, and even how far it will come, and I will vigorously debate that the answers are “over the next 3-5 years” and “far enough that you don’t want to buy now” — but those are opinions vs facts. While we may not have defaults accelerating the downward cycle, we do have the experience of watching the rest of the world burn. Once it’s common knowledge that yes, our house is on fire too, I don’t think people will dick around before heading for the exits, which will help speed the process along.

In the US, Barry Ritholtz points out that the spin from the NAR did not help anything. Something to keep in mind when reading CREA/TREB releases!

David Fleming had a look at his new condo at West Side Lofts, and was not impressed. An important reminder that pre-construction is supposed to sell at a significant discount because of the risks inherent in buying something sight-unseen. Plus of course the delays, and the risk the market could move against you.

An engineering student did a cross-Canada trip in an electric car he built himself! Should (slightly) help put people’s minds at ease about range anxiety and charging infrastructure, at least a little bit.

Michael James comments on an article about using “robot traders” to move against the herd and stabilize markets. He asks the same question that popped into my mind when I first saw it on Larry McDonald’s blog — who’ll pay for all of that trading, especially if the positions lose money for years at a time?

John Hempton of Bronte Capital had an interesting post about doing due diligence on an internet travel booking company in China. It’s a long post, but a good read on some basic ways to check up on a company you may be interested in. He came to the conclusion that the company was worth shorting, which raised something of a shitstorm — UTA was the biggest decliner on the NYSE the day after the blog post. There are two followup posts as well.

I’ve long been a browser tab addict with Firefox, opening all kinds of links in new tabs to follow-up on later. I usually use the CTRL-click shortcut to have a link open in a new tab, rather than right-clicking, then going to “open in new tab”. However, Netbug just pointed out that clicking with the middle mouse button (on most mice, that’s clicking your scroll wheel) also does the trick. Efficiency!

And finally, it’s a new school year, which generally means very little to the full-time grad student. However, it did mean the replaying of our annual introduction to the department for the new students, including laying out the details on tuition support and stipends/scholarships. Which has resumed a discussion that is near and dear to my heart: Year X & funding. Funding for students is only guaranteed out to 5 years for PhD students (4 for those who already have a MSc). However, the average degree takes something more like 7 years — indeed, just finding information on the actual statistics for the time to complete a degree is proving to be nearly impossible. If you’ve got any good data on these issues (even just at the departmental level at whatever university you’re at) please share! There was also some brief talk on the fact that the funding slide was exactly the same as the one I saw when I first arrived here [redacted] years ago, which was old even then. In over a decade there have been no cost-of-living adjustments to the stipends grad students get, even though the university can’t be ignorant of inflation, as tuition has gone up 35% in that time.

I’ve been super busy lately, and I’ve shifted my leisure habits from blogging, writing, and finance lately to playing StarCraft and fiddling with Flash animations (which had even fewer views than I had suspected, and zero comments… I guess I only find myself funny because I’m sleep deprived?).

Anyhow, this picture should give you an idea of how the diet has been going this week:

Ok, actually it wasn’t all that bad. I did get back on the bike, and aside from the last day of cookies (and tomorrow’s chocolate party), I have been pretty good with the diet. I caught up on my sleep over the weekend, which also helped a lot with feeling better and getting a workout in. However, according to my “aggressive yet totally doable thesis timeline” I was supposed to defend my thesis last week. As you have not seen a post to that effect (or even that I’ve finished the first draft of my thesis), you know that I didn’t defend my thesis last week. That made me sad, and cookies are good friends when you’re in your little box of sadness.

Despite the recent spate of results coming out of so many companies, I haven’t had time to go over any of them in any kind of detail, and haven’t listened to a single conference call this quarter. So I’m not really in much of a position to come up with any good investing posts, but that won’t stop me from spewing out a few half-baked thoughts in this quasi-weekly roundup:

BP: They capped the well, the stock recovered very nicely from the bottom… and then the stock went down and down and down again. I have no idea why. I’m ambivalent on it at this price: it’s not cheap enough to be interesting for me to buy more, but especially with the well capped so the liability is no longer infinite, I wouldn’t want to bail at this point…

DR.UN: Medical Facilities is a neat little income trust that I flagged a few months ago as one to watch for the next quarter or two to see how things go. They got really cheap there for a while, yielding up around 15% (which would likely become a ~11% dividend after conversion). I skimmed their quarterly release and things looked ok — not great, but ok — but I didn’t have time to really read it in detail. They’ve since gone up about 10%, and I’m no longer sure how much of the value is there…

The Banks: the Canadian housing market looks like it’s finally following the rest of the world back down to reality. Now, the Canadian banks have very little risk of complete loss associated with that event, but I doubt very much that even the CMHC makes the risk zero. AFAIK, they will at the very least face a reduction in their mortgage portfolios as the number of Canadian homeowners follows the American trajectory from ~69% back to the historical ~64%, and the sizes of those associated loans shrink. Once the downturn gets into full swing, they’ll probably have a few bad quarters/years until things shake out. So even though they already are starting to look cheap again, I’ve been sitting on my hands on the assumption that they’ll get cheaper in the next few years. Unfortunately, I suppose that could be described as fruitless market timing, and that this idea is already baked into the prices… that said I do still have some exposure to Canadian banks (I still hold TD), though I think I’m slightly underweight compared to the index.

Conversely, the American banks may have hit bottom already. BAC is making the top picks of several analysts, but I haven’t had time to do any research to see if it might be fore me… likewise Manulife has been getting cheaper by the day, yet again, I can’t say yet if it’s cheap enough. With these though, I’m not sure I’d ever be able to — these entities are just so big, with so many moving parts and black boxes, I don’t think I could ever fully get my head around them with the skills and tools I have at my disposal right now.

Links:

An interesting article on how scarce helium is on our planet, and how a bone-headed move by the US government is causing a large part of our reserves to be sold off at rock-bottom prices, making helium too cheap to bother recycling… for now. To be fair, we can manufacture helium from nuclear processes, but not in large quantities, and certainly not cheaply.

Also, Netbug has relaunched his blog, with a slightly new address.

I’ve had about 5 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours as I try to cram out (at the last minute, of course) some papers for an upcoming conference. It’s been a nightmare because, amongst other reasons, the ridiculous copyright policy of the conference means that we have to submit papers that are different enough from what we usually write that we can still have freedom to use our own work elsewhere. It’s hard enough to hammer out a paper in the first place, then to have to try to do it in the literary equivalent of a funny accent…

Anyhow, I’ve been battling with yet another nasty case of writer’s block — something that seems to hit me far too severely when it comes to my professional writing. I think Wayfare hit the issue on the head: I worry too much about how the work will be received for professional stuff and just lock up, whereas on my pseudo-anonymous blog I can just hammer away at the keyboard and not even worry about proof reading since I don’t have that much invested in it. Nothing to do but just try to get over it. In the meantime, Netbug suggested I take a quick break and put up at least a Tater’s Takes post, so here you go.

On the health/diet front, I found out that my scale got miscalibrated somewhere along the way. I’m not sure when it happened, but it was reading high by 3-4 pounds, which means I’ve really only gained about a pound from when I started. Still, wrong direction, but not quite as bad as I had thought. The last week was decent but not great: I’ve been watching what I eat more, but still had a few doughnuts at work through the week. I’ve started writing down my meal plan for a ~3 day period, and have been sticking to it reasonably well, and including lots of healthy stuff like vegetables and oatmeal, so that’s been good. I only had two good long bikerides in the week, but considering the week I’ve had, that’s pretty good (I plan on retrying the 36 km trip around Fanshawe Lake once these stupid stupid stupid papers are in).

“Today” though has been hell on the diet: I’ve resorted to undergrad cram tactics, pounding down full-sugar Coke & Red Bull and eating nothing but junk food to burn through the night. 3940 calories in the last 24 hour period (I don’t know what I consider a “day” anymore — best to try to stick to the subjective view of time the rest of you hold), which is simply not an efficient way to produce written words. As soon as the caffeine starts to wear off, I’m right into the head-bobbing vertigo stage of sleep deprivation, so I’m really hoping these stupid papers get finished soon.

In the news, BP’s latest cap attempt actually appears to be working. The stock shot up, then slid back down on perhaps fears that the shutting-in of the oil may have put too much pressure on the parts of the well below the ocean floor, causing oil to seep out (in a way that could be very difficult to control).

Also finance-related, a quick note that I sold my H&R REIT yesterday. Thanks to falling behind on my thesis and staying a grad student longer than my scholarship said I should I know that I’ll need to be raising cash, and also H&R is starting to look fully valued to me, so out it goes. Again, this isn’t a case of not liking the company, just thinking that the price was getting high enough…

I was going to look into the new Ontario “eco fee” tax this weekend and blog about it, but it looks like the negative publicity and poor roll-out has lead to it being canned… for now.

After running headlong into Bell’s very restrictive 25 GB data cap in May, I had to complain to any that would hear me that the $2/GB charge was very obviously excessive, and in no way actually reflected the incremental cost of that data usage. Plus, of course, the comparison to Rogers’ slightly more generous 60 GB cap (and 5 years ago the cap was also 60 GB, long before most users started watching videos on the internet, or Bell/Rogers themselves started rolling out video-on-demand portals). Netbug sent along an article that looks at this issue for US ISPs and concludes that indeed, most of the cost structure is composed of fixed-cost infrastructure type spending, and there’s no support in the ISPs’ business model for the caps and data charges that have been rolled out. Congestion issues are also unlikely to be the reason for the fees, since if congestion at peak times was the issue, the ISPs should instead implement time-of-use charges.