EclecticLip

The mining show this year (2010 - not sure if they recycle the web address annually) featured a lot more well-dressed people than in years past — which probably means a lot of first-timers, which itself means gold is due for a plunge.  All the better to part newcomers and their money. 

Longer-term, the outlook for the shiny-metal-with-the-colour-of-the-sun seems bright, if only because of the dire financial straits most countries seem to be in.  For example, if the interest rates on Japanese debt went up from their current 1.5%-ish to 4%, the annual interest would exceed the government’s entire tax revenues for everything.  This problem is exacerbated by demographic decline: the total population is dropping… but the “working-age” population is dropping much, much faster.  The same problems plague Europe and North America to varying extents.  On the plus side, Japanese vacations may become affordable again…

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In a complimentary copy of Resource World magazine, I saw an ad for a mining firm which noted that Green Technologies are dependent on “exotic” materials like silicon, neodymium, lanthanum, and heavy rare earth metals.  Yes, apparently silicon fits in that category, despite being a component of silica (sand) — the most abundant mineral in the earth’s crust!!

The free issue of BCBusiness featured a roundtable of economists, arguing over what governments should do to support the economy.  I’ve always considered economics to be a bit Rashomon-esque: starting with your political sensibility, you can find an entrenched economic philosophy that affirms it.  And I think the kaleidoscope of contradictory opinion in economics is one reason some business people disbelieve global warming — they can’t believe other fields actually achieve consensus on anything.  Anyways, the article did have an AWESOME moment of truth from John Richards of SFU. 

Q - What might be the most surprising thing in 2010?
A - I am no good at forecasting.

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I noticed a lot of companies from Yellowknife (”diamond capital of North America!”) at the conference, but that’s probably just because we made plans to visit the Northwest Territories in March — part of my ongoing “Tour de Tundra”.  I’m aiming for a Canadian Arctic tourism hat-trick; what with the Yukon two years back and the NWT this year, hopefully we can make it to Nunavut in 2012.  Y’know, before the Mayan calendar flips over. 

The combined Lonely Planet guide to the NWT and Nunavut — 32 pages, downloadable for about $2 — yielded some surprising facts.  For instance, the NWT legislature IS SHAPED LIKE AN IGLOO; and when it comes to official languages, the Territories have not two, not three, not four, not five (…let me skip ahead here…) but ELEVEN.  Eleven official languages, for thirty thousand people!  It puts Switzerland’s three-or-four, to shame. 

Apparently temperatures in Yellowknife in mid-March have ranged from -43 to +22 Celsius.  So, taking my planning cues from corporate leadership, I’ll be packing t-shirts and shorts. 

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While downtown yesterday, I went to a local company’s [stock-promoting] presentation, something I found out about through a connect at TEDxVancouver.  While I’m unsure about this company’s business model — perhaps because I don’t know much about business models! — I attended ’cause there’s always free food at these things.    I also scored a free copy of David Bach’s “Go Green, Live Rich”, which they were handing out.  I’m not that fond of the author, given that he filled the ”Finish Rich” book series with everyday pablum, but this book’s ghostwritten, is filled with nice stock images from iStockPhoto.com, and is tweaked for Canadians, so I figured I’d give it a chance.  Plus, the price was right!

On the topic of iStockPhoto.com, while shopping at the local PriceSmart Foods at Christmas, I noticed that the boxes of “Sun Brand” Japanese mandarins, and “Pagoda Brand” Chinese mandarins use the same stock photo on the box cover!  The only difference is that Pagoda actually replicates part of the original photo twice.  Someone at one of those two companies is either very dumb, or very very clever… 

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For the third year in eight, European nuclear reactors are having to shut down in summer, on account of the heat.  To understate things mildly, this does not bode well for nuclear as a major power source, in a warming world!  One-third of France’s nuclear capacity is currently offline, to avoid discharging excessively warm water into nearby rivers (water contains less dissolved oxygen as it gets warmer; pumping enough hot water into a river kills marine life).

France has 19 reactors, so if visualized as a litter of identical nineteen-uplets, this is equivalent to knocking six of them offline during peak periods when everyone’s turning up the “climatiseur”.  (Another three are run full-time to enrich the uranium fuel — sadly I can’t recall my source, but it was a generally reliable contributor to The Oil Drum — so electricity for civic purposes has dropped from sixteen to ten reactors’ worth.)

Back home, Ontario’s Bruce Power reactors are sited next to Lake Huron (a much larger body of water) so shouldn’t ever suffer this kind of problem.  For lake- or ocean-side reactors, the primary hurdle to nuclear power is cost — a hurdle with which the fuel cell industry is all too familiar. 

The estimated cost of nuclear power (as calculated by companies submitting bids to build reactors in various countries) is in the 20 cents/kWh range over the reactor lifetime.  Consequently, nuclear is more expensive than pretty much everything but solar photovoltaics — and the latter are getting cheaper as production scales up.  (Each time worldwide installations double, solar gets about 20% cheaper.  And installations are doubling every 2-3 years.)

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Fiendishly busy at work — in a good way — so some quick notes on the intensifying rivalry in hybrids.

Honda wanted to pip Toyota’s lead on hybrids, by releasing the new Insight at a far lower price point.  For Canada at least, though, currency fluctuations mean the final price hasn’t been set quite yet.  Basically, since Toyota has the perception of “first and most advanced” Honda’s tried to carve out the spot of “most affordable”.  And for one month at least, in Japan, the Insight did wrest the Prius’ hybrid sales crown.

I’ve heard rumour that Toyota has dropped Prius prices to arrest Honda’s momentum in Japan — and they’re also releasing the new Prius in a few months.  So they should easily regain the sales title.  And it’ll apparently compete head-on with Honda’s “most affordable” hybrid claim by releasing a “budget” hybrid in a couple years’ time as well.

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In related recent automotive news, Ford publicized the sale of their 100,000th hybrid SUV; Toyota shortly followed with an announcement that they’d surpassed 1,000,000 hybrid sales in that country.

Nice to see carmakers fighting each other for the environmental halo — especially since, if one of them starts greenwashing, the others surely won’t hesitate to point it out. 

I attended the Peter Senge lecture at the Vancouver Board of Trade yesterday. He’s the MIT lecturer who wrote “The Fifth Discipline” years ago, about learning organizations. His latest is “The Necessary Revolution”, about corporate efforts to develop true, legitimate, authentic sustainability. He made some very interesting comments, detailed below the fold:

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Seems Men’s Health spoke too soon in impugning Outback Steakhouse’s Aussie Fries (see earlier post here).

Armour brand pork brains in milk gravy contain more than 1000% of your daily recommended intake of cholesterol.  On the other hand, it is brain food.

(Hat tip consumerist.)

(more under the fold)

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It was reported recently that GM was using bailout money to expand production in Brazil.  Fortunately, it appears as though the sources were misquoted.  (Hat tip to Jesse.)  If that had been the case, then I think the automaker’s leaders would’ve been called back to Washington for a verbal grilling.  Or whatever passes for a verbal grilling by lawmakers who for the most part can ill afford to make deep-pocketed enemies.  (The individuals, not the companies, that is.)

That’s why this harangue by Michael Capuano (D-Mass) to the CEO’s of the US’s eight biggest banks — which even got excerpted on CBC radio — was particularly gratifying.  Even if — or perhaps, especially since – the CEO’s will probably escape further consequences.  Sadly, like so many US industries, the financial sector appears to have achieved regulatory capture of the regulators intended to oversee them, in the public’s interest.

(video under the fold)

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I linked to a FlowingData post on WalMart’s growth across the US, earlier.
They’ve now got a similar graph showing the growth of Target - which, as it turns out, started up in the same year.

From what it seems, this is a business analogue of convergent evolution.

In biological cases, different species may develop similar traits, especially if they’re targeting the same ecological niche.  In this business case, Target and WalMart both started off aiming to be low-cost department-store vendors; aiming for this economic niche, they seem to have independently come up with very similar formulas for successful suburban “big box” retailing.

Curiously, while Target’s main colour is red (and WalMart is blue), Target is reputed to generally support Democrats (”blue states”) while WalMart generally supports Republicans (”red states’).

This is different from what happened with the trio of McDonald’s - Wendy’s - Burger King, which is a business analogue of horizontal gene transfer.

HGT is a process whereby one organism takes genes from another.  This doesn’t seem to happen between “higher” life forms (like us) but is apparently fairly common among “lower” life forms. When bacteria develop drug resistance, it could be that some bacteria were drug-resistant to begin with, and that only those bacteria survived to reproduce.  But since bacteria swap genes near-indiscriminately with each other, bacteria-species-A might have acquired the gene for drug-resistance from bacteria-species-B!

Indeed, HGT is the biggest challenge to the Darwinian idea of a tree of life; Darwin assumed genetic variation is only caused by transmission from parents to offspring.  The “family-values” version of evolution, if you will.

HGT implies that genetic variation — at least among the single-celled creatures who started us off — could also come by transmission between any two organisms which got close enough to do the microbial equivalent of French kissing.  This superimposes an “orgy” layer atop the “family-values” model above.

In the fast food example above, the founders of Wendy’s and Burger King both heard of McDonald’s success, and went to California to study the business.  They then returned to their stomping grounds (Wendy’s - Ohio; Burger King - Florida) and started up their own versions.  This is a business analogue to HGT, because the Wendy’s and Burger King corporations didn’t independently come up with the business model, they copied it from McDonald’s.

On a Boston-bound business… trip.  (What’s a word that begins with “b” and is synonymous with trip?)

Cultural anthropology and other travel notes below:

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…and make space for Bacon Today!

 Wonder how long before it gets referenced on the Simpsons? 

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HuffPo recently pulled in more venture cap funding, giving it a valuation of about $100 million.  Not at all bad, considering NewsCorp, with its currently $17-billion market cap, just lost $6 billion, and the New York Times is valued at a gaunt $700 million.

With its all-web format, I think the HuffPo stands to be a huge winner in the new news era.  It’s like WalMart competing against mom-and-pop shops — they have an inherent, substantial cost structure advantage.  And heck, I’d write for them if I could!