The “Oil Curse” or “Curse of Oil” or “Resource Curse” is the net negative outcome that is seen with any single industry that takes over a geographic area. The central idea is that when oil is discovered in an undeveloped land, like rural Africa, the initial promise of great wealth results in rapid development and that leads to what economists call ‘externalities’. Externalities are charges that should be calculated as part of the cost of development but instead are pushed…
Donald Trump and friends have been banging on this border wall idea for years and their supporters are energized by it. Our editorial staff have spent days thinking about how Trump supporters could be so insistent that a border wall is needed when it so obviously is not (let’s not argue the pro’s and con’s here, just follow the big picture logic below)… and we think we came up with the answer. In short, Trump / Wall supporters don’t know…
US vs Canada Income Distribution Explained in a Simple Graph. In the graph below we compare American and Canadian Individual (as opposed to household) incomes. In particular we were interested in the difference in income distributions. To get to the point, you can see that: If you earn more than USD $50K you are in the top 25% of Canadians but 35% of Americans If you earn more than USD $100K you are in the top 2% of Canadians but…
Below is a graphs showing American income distribution for individual (not households) in 2017. To get to the point, if you earn: More than USD $50K you are in the top one third of Americans More than USD $100K you are in the top 14% of Americans More than USD $200K you are in the top 4% of Americans US Income # of People Percentage of Population $ 0 to $10K 25610 20% $10K to $25K 22779 18% $25K…
Huawei is the massive Chinese telecom company that has mysterious financing and ownership. Their murky connections to the Chinese Government and military are of such great concern that some Western nations and companies have severed ties with Huawei. This is our third report in our series on the largest telecom company in the world. Our other two are: 10 Short Answers To Why Huawei is so Scary To Western Countries Who Owns Huawei? A Fascinating Story Which Countries Have Banned…
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation said: We’re deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company (like Huawei) that is beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks. That provides the capacity to exert pressure or control over our telecommunications infrastructure. It provides the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information. And it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage. but no-one has provided specifics. What has Huawei…
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…