I doubt any of the professionals in the room would fall for chain letters, winning-lottery-ticket emails or advance fee fraud (the son of the brother of the President of Nigeria needs your help!) – but we indeed shared the collective gullibility that there was a way to rake in the dough at the Wall Street casino.

Come of think of it, apart from style of dress and dental health, we were probably no different from our tribal forebears in millenia past, who sought shamans’ advice to ensure their own prosperity.  (Contrary to popular belief, cavities seem to’ve been rare, way back in the day – most food simply wasn’t sugary enough to cause tooth decay.)  And I suppose our behaviour wasn’t so different, either, from Fortune 500 executives bringing in high-priced consultants to turn their companies around.  It all seems like a lot of dart-throwing, in the end. 

The course centred on “technical analysis”, the theory that a stock’s price follows near-immutable patterns – unless it doesn’t, which is why you arrange your bets such that you cash out with only a small loss the other 48% of the time; the stock market equivalent of a seat belt and air bags, I suppose.  Nor is it as nutty as some of the purportedly-professional investment advice I’ve read, some of which relied on planetary alignments.  (Hmm… maybe that was the Wall Street Journal’s astrologer?)

As for the brotherhood of technical analysts – there’s no handshake, but the password is “Fibonacci” – their investment numerology is based on the purported role of the Golden Mean (0.618) and various permutations thereof, in predicting future prices.  I’m not sure if Euclid would’ve been proud or horrified, but since he was smart, he’d’ve probably demanded a royalty.

By the logic of this arcane rubric, it should be possible to make money on a stock without knowing a thing about the company.  While I’ve proven the opposite true many a time, that prospect struck me as somehow inappropriate.  After all, even when it comes to making money in the stock market, shouldn’t you have to earn it by putting in hard work to research a company, and so forth?  Then the cognitive dissonance hit me: I had enrolled in a course to learn how to make easy money, and was now irritated that there could be a way of making easy money.  Naturally, I resolved this by deciding that maybe easy money wasn’t such a bad thing after all.  When it was in the right hands.  Specifically, mine.  Such is the clueless egotism of the modern male. 

All in all, the course reaffirmed my sense that the surest way to get rich quickly off of secret knowledge is to claim you have some, then meter it out for an exorbitant fee.  A recent motivational poster from despair.com does put it nicely. 

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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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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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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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A sample looks-good-at-first-glance sentence is the following:

In fact, while companies like BP and Shell are cutting back on commercial projects in wind and solar, Big Oil is taking a closer look at how they might be used to increase efficiency internally, or to free up increasingly profitable fossil fuels, like natural gas, for commercial sale.

If going green means cutting back on alternative energy programs, George W Bush should’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize.    Increasing efficiency is something any good business does, so that’s not a real mark of improvement.  And the stated reason for pursuing natural gas is money-green, not sustainability-green.
As it turns out, this is a case of advertiser-funded media gone awry.  From ClimateProgress:

Newsweek since 2007 has sold advertising packages to the oil industry’s biggest influence group that included the right to co-host forums on energy issues, including two where members of Congress sat side-by-side on panels with the association’s president.

American Petroleum Institute ranks among advertisers that have reached a spending threshold that allows them to attach their name to a Newsweek event and have their top executive as a panel speaker…

…journalism and ethics experts decried the arrangement.

“You’re selling access,” said Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. “Newsweek is using its reputation as a great news organization to convene these officeholders to talk about public policy. Then it’s renting out a space at the table for one of its customers who would not be at the table if not for giving money to Newsweek”…

To mark this occasion, and in light of the current goings-on at Copenhagen, I put together a “Big Oil Hierarchy of Denial”, along the lines of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the Five Stages of Grief.  Sort of a guidebook to the different stages that Exxon & co have gone through, over the years.  Enjoy!

Note: the list is to be read from the bottom up. 

Here, here, and here.

In light of this wonderful occasion — Blog Day’s “wood” anniversary –  here is a timely Demotivator® poster from the cheery folks at despair.com. 

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.)

Riffing on Europe a bit longer, the EU has met its Kyoto commitments.  (This is part of the reason they’re so angry at us Canadians, who so haven’t.)  Furthermore, they achieved this in 2007, *before* the economic slowdown, which by virtue of less manufacturing going on, is itself reducing global emissions rates.  (Indeed, last year was the first time since the second world war that global electricity consumption dropped, year-on-year.)

That Europe hasn’t descended into anarchic economic chaos (at least as of end-2007 mind you!) would doubtless come as a surprise to some commentators.  That is, if they heard the news in the first place — not likely — and if they believed it, which is even less so.  Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. 

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Seguing into the recession, the markets have begun heading down for another stretch, likely to revisit — and plumb below — the lows observed in October / March.  One reason for believing this is that on June 4, Jim Cramer said that we’re in a bull market.  (Which, by the rule-of-thumb that one should do the opposite of what he says, implies that general stocks are heading down.    )

To his credit, the Dow did trend up for eight calendar days after Mr. Cramer’s prognostication, cresting a robust 1.4% higher.  But it’s been an ugly few weeks since.  And is likely to continue to be, as numerous communal superstitions of stock traders, are pointing rather downwards — a long way downwards.

One effect of the ongoing malaise is that oil prices should head a lot lower (with negligible effect at the gas pump, of course!    ).  In combination with lower costs and prices across the board (as employers gain the upper hand in wage negotiations, and companies decide it’s better to sell goods at a small loss than sell nothing at all) this suggests a deflationary trend for a little while, at least for non-food items.  (With the weather, you never can tell…)

While deflation — kryptonite to a central bank — has done more damage to Tokyo’s financial district than all of Godzilla’s twenty-eight visits combined, there is an upside.  I don’t know if anyone’s discovered it yet, but I’m sure there is one.  Even slugs serve a purpose, after all. 

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Lastly, in my ongoing search for leadership literature which enriches readers’ lives (as opposed to the authors’) I came across this excellent research on the Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to their level of maximum incompetence.  Basically, someone might be a great engineer, but a terrible manager.  The reason they get promoted to manager is that they’re a great engineer — but since their engineering skills are overdeveloped, their managerial skills are probably underdeveloped.  It’s like how lobsters have a huge left claw, and a puny right one.

When this sort of thing happens, the company loses out in two ways — they lose the productivity of the great engineer, and suffer the burden of a subpar manager.

The solution, the researchers found, was to promote people *randomly*.  This gives a better chance of “naturally-gifted” managers getting managerial roles, and ensures the company keeps its superstar engineers, doing what they do best.  Since random promotions probably aren’t motivational, they offered that one could alternate in promoting the very best and the very worst performers, on the lobster logic that if someone doesn’t have the gift for being a good engineer (to continue the example)… they’re statistically more likely to have a gift for management!!

Oh, what I’d give to be a fly on the wall at one of those promotion meetings… 

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.

Turns out he’d majored in Sanskrit and minored in (classical) Chinese back in the day.  As you might imagine, he had noooooo idea about technical matters, but gave me the names of several folks who do know that stuff, to follow up with.  He paid for lunch too, which was great; though if he’d told me in advance, I’d've ordered dessert. 

I did find out that a mid-nineties American poll ranked mining companies even lower than tobacco companies in public perception — and that was fifteen years of environmental devastation ago!  Also, Rio Tinto Alcan (generally regarded as one of the world’s most progressive miners nowadays, they even got kudos from Jared Diamond in Collapse) takes its name from a region in southern Spain, where mining has gone on since Gilgamesh wrestled Enkidu in ancient Sumeria.  (In fairness to Enkidu, Gilgamesh was an unwelcome wedding crasher.)  The Tinto River is so acidic that after the medieval Arabs discovered sulfuric acid, they named the Tinto the “river of vitriol” in its honour.  Extremophile microbes are actually responsible for the acidity, which drops the river pH down to 2.0 — three times as acidic as Coca-Cola!  (Coke has a pH of 2.5, but pH being a logarithmic measure, a pH change of 1 unit represents a tenfold acidity difference, and 0.5 units a roughly threefold difference.)

That said, we who recoil most at scabrous mine sites — open sores on the world’s natural splendour — are generally the greatest recipients of their bounty, through our laptops, iPods, autos — even our electrical wiring and indoor plumbing.  To misquote Al Gore, it’s an irritating truth.