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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We went on a double date on Saturday with some friends, to the Metro Vancouver landfill in Delta.  (There was an open house, and being the romantic type that I am…)  We spent a couple hours there and saw all the highlights — the mountains of garbage, the compost piles, huge machinery (sitting idle), and Teamsters (funnily enough, also sitting idle). 

Some of the trucks were basically steamrollers with spiky knobs on the wheels; the vehicular equivalent of high heels, I suppose.  The knobs concentrate the weight of the vehicle, compressing the mountains of trash.  (And there are several mountains.)

There were maybe a dozen booths set up — like a small farmer’s market — where one could pick up materials from BC Hydro PowerSmart, local composting or wildlife groups.  Unlike any farmer’s market I’d been to though, they had volunteers grilling up hot dogs and burgers (free ones!).  There was pop, but no bottled water, funnily enough. 

There were also some falconers — falcons are brought in occasionally to scare away seagulls; some contractors even train the falcons not just to intimidate, but to kill.  With that in mind, I asked if the falcons could be used against Canada geese; but it seems the latter don’t scare easily.  I believe the falconer’s words were “oh, no - they’d probably kill [falcon’s name which I’ve forgotten]”.  Frankly, I’d've thought a pirate with a falcon would have gotten more props than pirates with parrots, but what do I know?  I’d've thought the frilly, puffy-sleeved shirts didn’t convey menace very well, either. 

I did ask Metro Vancouver Wastewater Treatment if they had open houses; sadly, they don’t.  I’ll have to book a private appointment.  They did say that they can tell when each period of a playoff game ends, ’cause everyone gets up and uses the washroom at once.

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As for the Eat! Vancouver show, all the usual suspects were there — Freedom 55, Club Intrawest (time-shares), Tourism Barbados…

As is now the custom at these shows, they handed out reusable plastic bags at the entrance, this time from Bosa Foods.  Puzzlingly, my resuable bag contained a disposable plastic bag in which the freebies were placed.  (My two co-show goers’ bags were disposables-free.)  Given how popular these are as handouts, one wonders how many reusable (but unused) plastic bags now line the continent’s closets and pantries.  Marc Jaccard, who studies the effectiveness of climate legislation at SFU, points out that most people have unused compact fluorescent lights in their closets, because — like him — they bought more than they could install.  The underlying point is that these devices don’t save energy (or in the case of the bags, plastic) unless they’re actually used.

The folks from Liberation BC (an animal welfare group) were there; from them I learned that the SPCA actually has a certificate program to identify livestock producers who treat the animals less cruelly.  They were seated beside a local pork farmer, and seemed politely resigned to their situation’s irony.  The fellow sells sausages at the local farm markets, so presumably doesn’t use factory farming techniques, which are fairly capital intensive.

They also pointed me to the Rabbit River Farms booth, home of BC’s first SPCA-approved eggs.  Looking at the surprisingly richly-hued contents of the egg basket they’d brought, I realized that I’d come to assume that not only did eggs only come in white or brown, but that they only came in one specific shade each of white or brown.  The baskets contained eggs which were Small, Medium and Large, and a few half again as large, euphemistically referred to as “Ouch”.  Apparently, as hens get older they produce fewer but bigger eggs.  Sort of like Beethoven with his symphonies, I guess.

The folks from Island Farms were there too, with samples of cantaloupe-flavoured ice cream, which comes in containers labelled with bigger Chinese characters than Western.  Melon-flavoured ice cream is pretty big in Japan, so I suppose they’re targeting Asian tastes.  Avalon Dairy was there also.  The purveyors of bottled milk had developed an Omega-3 enriched milk product, sold as Vitala.  (Before I continue, I can’t help commenting that the impact of making and transporting glass bottles is almost certainly larger than the impact of a landfilled-after-one-use Tetra Pak.  It’s a case where a twentieth-century packaging solution is better than the older nineteenth-century one.)

But I digress.  Vitala milk is Omega-3 enriched.  I asked whether they feed the cows a high-flax diet (a trick used by some companies to make eggs’ yolks a deeper yellow, and allow Omega-3 claims to be made) — and that was true.  But there was more.  Their diet is tuna-enriched.  (Our cat doesn’t even get a tuna-enriched diet!  Well, not all that often.)  Tuna, which sits near the top of the marine food web, reduced to a bovine nutritional supplement…  (”Mercury-fortified”!    )

While the cows get factory dregs (the “mechanically separated meat” equivalent of the fish-food industry) the predator-to-prey ratio is like a pyramid: you need a lot at the bottom of the food web to support a few at the top.  (Hmm… not unlike manager-employee ratios, come to think of it…)  Taking the top levels down to the base of another pyramid is astonishingly inefficient; it’d be like growing wildebeest to feed lions to fatten giraffes.

Last weekend, we ventured to Salt Spring Island.  Though Canadian, it has strong American ties, having been a haven for American peaceniks in the 1960’s … but also a refuge for African-Americans escaping racism in 1850’s California.  Many Hawaiians also settled there in the 1800’s, all of which means it’d be the perfect site for a future Obama family reunion. 

Aya didn’t want to fly in a float plane, so we took the ferry.  We made landfall seven hours and five minutes after leaving the apartment, clocking up an average speed trip of… nine-point-five km per hour, or half the speed of the guy who won the Vancouver Marathon the other week.  On the bright side, I got to catch up on some reading — so much so, that I ran out of book before I ran out of time.

We stayed in Ganges, which, as befits any small town (the town centre could easily fit inside Metrotown) has some quirk in its character.  For one, our hotel had an attached farm.  No roosters, though, to our relief.    The Salt Spring Saturday market, which looked much the same as any other, except for the preponderance of hemp products on sale.  We perused the Italian deli, whose magazine collection included a few copies of Bakers’ Journal (”official magazine of the BC Baking Industry” or some such), and sticking with the Italian theme, one of the soap shops sold bath crystals as “body gelato” — a clever rebranding.  Maybe not as ingenious as when Marlboro’s went from women’s cigarette (”Mild as May”) to cowboy’s cancer-stick (”Marlboro Country”) but clever none the less.  Oh, and blue used to be a baby girl colour, too. 

The teenaged attendant at one of the tea retailers helped us select a couple blends they’d discovered at the World Tea Expo, held every year in that world-reknown tea capital, Vegas.  He then turned his attention back to what appeared to be Star Wars: Force Unleashed, dispatching some foes with bloodlusting gusto.

A few years back, some enterprising souls at the Chamber of Commerce came up with the idea of issuing a local currency, featuring the work of area artists.  So the Salt Spring Island Monetary Fund was formed, and issued a series of bills backed 80% by Canadian dollars and 20% by gold.  Essentially gift certificates, they figure it’s kept millions of dollars on the island, as tourists bring the bills back as novelties to show their friends, and never wind up spending them on the island.  I only got $10 worth, myself. 

Demand for the $50 and $100 Salt Spring Dollar bills comes almost exclusively from numismatists, or coin-collectors (correction: rich coin-collectors).  The SSIMF recently released a $50 half-ounce silver coin with a killer (whale) design, all the better to exploit those rubes (correction: wealthy rubes).     At today’s prices, that’s an entire eight dollars of silver.  Adding in two bucks of processing and other costs — surely an overestimate — and the SSIMF’s profit margin is a sweet 400%.

Ninety-plus-percent of businesses on the island accept the bills — even the banks (!) — meaning it’s a fully functioning local currency.  You can presumably use it on the island’s two taxicabs, and bus service.  (The latter consists of a bus.)  But lest any of you entrepreneurial types perceive a business opportunity in photocopying knock-off Salt Spring Island Dollar bills, they do in fact have holograms and the like.

…continuing the adventures of two Canadians in Boston, in regards to public transit, iced tea and donuts…

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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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