Below is a list of the of the six cars GM is dropping from production in 2019. All of these products make up just 8% of General Motors’ US sales and if you exclude the Cruze, that number falls to just 3.5%. If you exclude the Cruze and the Impala, the remaining 4 cancelled cars only provide GM with 1.7% of sales. There is a reason the stock market bounced GM up on this news. Do the math, GM is…
When we watch the TV or read the newspaper we often see something like “OIL IS UP TODAY” but we really don’t know what that means because there are so many different types of crude oil, each with its own price. Below we briefly explore the 6 oil products that are common to Canadians and Americans and at the bottom of this article we show 60 crude oil types and their prices from around the globe. You can see that…
This short clip from the author of “Prius or Pickup?” Jonathan Weiler, explains that political parties on the left and the right have stopped defining themselves by the size of government and instead focused in emotional responses to identity politics. The discussion uses the US system of Democrat vs Republican but it applies to nearly all parties globally. Political parties now energize there voters by vilifying the other side based on their identity: immigrant vs multi-generation citizen rural vs urban…
There is much hype on the so-called “non-market” clause in the USMCA (aka. NAFTA 2.0): ‘Astonishing’ clause in new deal suggests Trump wants leverage over Canada-China trade talks: experts SOURCE Chinese embassy in Canada condemns ‘US veto’ clause in North America trade deal SOURCE Beijing attacks USMCA clause seen as blocking efforts to expand trade with Canada, Mexico SOURCE Alarm bells ring over non-market economy clause SOURCE and it many political opponents wrote things like: Conservative MP Michael Chong accused…
In many parts of Canada and United States there is a drive to a minimum wage of $15/hour. Some places like San Francisco and Alberta have already at that historic rate. While all but the most ardent on the political right have little issue with very existence of a minimum wage, the question has been what should it the minimum wage be? You can click the map to the right to see the minimum wages that are being paid in…
What Happens To Transformational Technologies Like Fusion When Even Governments Say It Will Take Too Long To Develop? The short video below explains how technology that can fundamentally change the world through things like limitless energy is something that few investors or even governments want to fund. In this world of short-termism in which elected officials can only see to the next election and CEO’s are only concerned about the next three quarters, there are some who are willing to…
For many years I have argued that the solution to high health care costs with universal access is “Single Payer” with “Private Providers”. In other-words, the government collecting taxes from everyone for prescribed services though provided private health care companies that compete for those dollars through their own hospitals, clinics, home care… . And before you get your twitter-rage up, yes, I know that “prescribed services” is a particularly thorny phase that will cause many to recoil, but I think we…
Why is it so difficult to get large scale projects (like national debt reduction and major infrastructure projects) even considered in the United States political system? This is a question I started asking myself years ago when I discovered that the American electoral system has a 2 year cycle for Congress (aka Parliament). It is apparent that it takes more than two years of work to get a candidate into position and raise the money that is required to run…
In an era of apparently undeniable Russian state sponsored interference in American and UK Elections social media companies like Facebook, Twitter & Google have been called to account for their part in the ‘attacks’. This begs the question, how much responsibility do internet and social media companies really have for blocking misinformation by primarily foreign entities? In this video Bloomberg explores Keith Rabois’, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and PayPal Vice President, opinion that social media is just another form…
We recently completed research on an article evaluating how Alberta, Edmonton and Calgary generate their electricity and that got us to thinking about how Canada compares to the United States. In a word, Canada, largely because Quebec produces an outrageous (and growing) amount of Hydro. Obviously this is a percentage calculation, given that the United States has 10 times the population of Canada. Canadian Electricity Generation Source 2016: SOURCE United States Electricity Generation Source 2016: Of the 866…
This interesting video explains that while the world economy has recovered from the 2008 economic collapse, wages are still only growing at the rate of inflation; that is half of what they were growing before the Great Recession. This is because the 80% of corporate profits are now concentrated in just 10% of companies and mostly those are tech giants. The so called ‘superstar firms’ like Apple, Facebook and Google are advancing technology and intellectual property at a staggering rate.…
Yale Professor Julia Santos teaches the most popular class in Yale University history on how to reduce stress through routine real, physical social interaction. Social Media give today’s students the impression of interaction but it is so cursory as to only cause increase angst because students end up unnecessarily comparing them selves to others. What students (and everyone else) needs is routine social interactions like a coffee at Starbucks every morning where they talk to the staff or retail jobs…
There has been much talk lately about the United States removing military personnel from Germany, Japan and South Korea in an effort to save money. In 2016, future President Trump said “They do not pay us. But they should be paying us, because we are providing tremendous service and we’re losing a fortune” SOURCE In 2018, the Pentagon is analyzing the cost and impact of a large-scale withdrawal or transfer of American troops stationed in Germany, amid growing tensions between President Trump…
There is recent evidence that robots will not take all the manual labour jobs and that in fact, if you live in first world countries you will likely gain jobs from factories coming back to the US, Canada, EU, UK, Australia… We have been on the road to mass robotic automation for about a decade now and while there is much left to learn in our uncertain future, there is now enough data to see some unexpected trends developing. Most…
We ask this question sincerely and without malice: What’s Wrong With Immediate Deportations Of Illegal Immigrants? We are proposing a streamlining of the process that removes the judicial review process to a a much more efficient non-judicial initial review of illegal migrants taking place at a much lower level (somewhere above the the Customs Officers but below the IRB). Who Decides If A Migrant is “Illegal” Under Todays Immigration System? In Canada these case reviews are handled by the Immigration…
Recently we posted THIS article and video explaining that the Dutch have pragmatically decided not to incarcerate people for petty crimes and that has resulted in a 19 of 65 prisons closing. We received an interesting response from Jack J on our YouTube channel, challenging that claim and counter claiming that the recent immigration issues in Europe has caused a spike in Dutch crime which is not accounted for in official statistics: …It is logical that in a homogeneous society…