EclecticLip

Ah, January — when mutual funds roll out ads for RRSP season, and investment advisors get exponentially busier as February 28 approaches.  This year, the industry’s “Christmas-after-Christmas” season will be particularly joyous, as many funds will have risen 20% or more in 2009.  That still qualifies as underachievement, though, as the Toronto index rose 27% on the strength of…   well, on the strength of it no longer being 2008. 

Now, according to the Globe & Mail’s mutual fund site, sixteen of twenty-two Canadian gold funds had returns of 100% or more, in the year ending November 30.  That’s a poorly-chosen datapoint — November 2008 was the absolute nadir of that sector — but it’s the latest data available on the Globeinvestor website as of this writing.  And it shows that for such funds last year, a dart-throwing monkey could’ve probably doubled people’s money… that is, if they were foolish enough to trust their entire savings to an ape.  Mind you, considering how the ape’s competition did, that might not have been a bad idea…!

Still on the topic of dextrous chimps, the Vancouver gold show coming up will see hordes of company reps looking to fleece the uninitiated with some old-school Vancouver Stock Exchange bravura.  Bre-X was ten years ago, Southwestern was so 2008, so someone new has to carry the torch!

The venue should be obvious from the assortment of protesters politely asking conference-goers not to invest in a various companies pillaging their way through foreign lands like the humans in the movie “Avatar”.  There’s a story going around that our mining companies have been so ruthless in Latin America, Canadian tourists are sewing American flags on their travel gear.  Like most such stories, it’s probably untrue in the immediate factual sense (I doubt many tourists are doing this) but it does point to a commonly-held belief, which is in this case true (some Canadian mining companies do some vicious things for their shareholders).

Back to activism though.    During our recent Portland trip, I was privy to the most effective protest leaflet I’ve ever seen.  A few well-dressed individuals from the “In Defense of Animals” group were handing out copies of the professionally-designed, high-gloss postcard below (on the web here).

Basically, they praised Nordstrom and its founders, praised its customers as compassionate individuals, and explained that since the chain had done so well in almost completely eliminating fur from its sold goods, wouldn’t you please politely tell the manager you’d like them to phase out the remaining fur products?  While most protest groups would direct their outrage at the store or the very consumers to whom they’re passing out leaflets, these guys neatly separated the evil “other”, the Jungian shadow, into a separate category.

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Male humpback whales — like Sir Mix-A-Lot — like voluptuous females.  Or at least, what passes for voluptuousness in the cetacean world.

For their part, female humpbacks may prefer their males to be exotic foreigners — or again, what passes for foreign among creatures who migrate far enough each year to half-circumnavigate the globe.
There was a famous case in the mid-nineties (in nerd herds, at least) of some Indian Ocean male humpbacks getting lost and veering into the Pacific Ocean.  Their songs were different from those of the males in the local Pacific Ocean population — but within two years, almost all the Pacific Ocean-male humpbacks had changed their songs to be more like the Indian Ocean males’!

And to complete a humpback hat trick, here’s a link to a website about a wild albino humpback named Migaloo. 

Marc at the CCPA notes the BC carbon tax’s first birthday was Feb 18, with a rather depressing fairy tale.  Hopefully her second birthday will find her better-appreciated than she currently is, in her stunted state. (Ten bucks a tonne won’t drive any consumer behaviour.  Nor will fifteen bucks a tonne.)

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I suppose the appropriate analogy would be that this is the first anniversary of the conception of the carbon tax, July 1st being its actual “date of birth”.

Well, here’s to hoping that she has a dino-sized growth spurt from turkey-sized compsognathus to titanic T-Rex (or should that be tyrannosaurus regina?) with appropriate redirection of funds towards emissions-offsetting projects and infrastructure, and tax cuts veering strongly progressive.

The Tory government’s TFSA (tax-free savings account) is an example of a stunningly regressive tax benefit — its benefits skew disproportionately to the wealthy.  And it’s projected to be expensive too - roughly $50 million in lost tax revenue in ‘09, $150 million in ‘10… pretty soon, you’re talking about real money!

This New York Times article summarizes why I believe peak oil’s imminence doesn’t mean the end of first-world living-standards as we know it.

It turns out, the US is ridiculously unproductive when it comes to GDP-per-unit-CO2: at 93rd (of 137) it ranks below even Thailand and Mexico!  [corrected from 167 as per comment below]
Ah, but there’s more to that than meets the eye…

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This story, that Venus looks a lot more interesting in infrared and ultraviolet — both outside the human visible spectrum — reminded me of the futility of anthropocentrism.
After all, flowers such as this, look different under ultraviolet light (invisible to us, visible to insects).

As another example, elephants can hear frequencies far lower than we can hear — in fact, that’s how they communicate over long distances!  I suppose that also means they can hear the workings of our digestive system.  It’s probably fortunate for us that our internal workings only rarely come into our own audible range…