Random Thoughts

The Election As yesterday’s election result was a bit of a surprise to me (and a lot of other people it seems ) I wanted to dig in to the results a little to try and explain exactly what we’re seeing. As I looked at the ElectoralCollege map what stood out to me was how Trump managed to flip states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and maybe Michigan from Democrat to Republican. With the exception of Ohio, George W. Bush didn’t win any of those states in 2000 or 2004 and they were all supposed to be a part of Hillary Clinton’sfirewall . So what changed and what does it have to do with trade? Trade As someone who has taken a lot of economics courses I’m a big proponent of trade. That said, I understand why people are often skeptical of its benefits. For better or worse, trade is almost always a net benefit to a country but the benefits are not shared evenly throughout the economy and it is usually really easy to see the places that were negatively impacted. To illustrate I’v...

Why? If you live in Alberta and you're lucky enough to still have a job you might think the current real estate market presents a buying opportunity. Because I work in finance I'm often asked about my opinion on when the best time to buy is and where I think prices are going. Obviously, real estate markets are hard to predict because there are many factors at play but if you understand how these factors impact price I think you'll have a much better chance at making the right decision. The Basics Like almost everything else in the world real estate prices are based on supply and demand and can be graphically shown using a chart like the one below. Basically, where the willingness to supply new houses meets the demand to purchase those houses you have an equilibrium. If you then draw two lines across and down from that intersection you will find the price where the market is balanced and the quantity where that market is balanced. This is the basic approach to de...

Introduction In a previous post  I asserted that because medical appointments were so frequently late the providers of those services were rude (or trying to maximize their own revenue) and that with better planning these appointments could be on-time way more often. Given the subject matter I should have anticipated a lot of resistance to these ideas and flushed out the statistics behind scheduling but I didn't. This post attempts to rectify that short-coming and will dig into the details of scheduling and why I believe the current methods of scheduling medical appointments is not optimal. In a Perfect World... Some of the criticism of my first approach was that "healthcare deals with people, not numbers", "each patient is different" and "there is no way to predict which patients will require more time". It seems I was being accused of thinking that medical appointments could be analyzed and suddenly they would all take exactly the same amount of...

My Experience For a good portion of the last decade I rarely went to the doctor and I rarely had any encounters with the medical system at all. That of course changed when my wife, Stephanie, became pregnant with twins almost 4 years ago and now that we are close to having our third child I have had lots of recent encounters with the system. The reason I'm writing this post though is that I have become frustrated by how often a medical appointment time appears to be a very loose guideline (and never in a good way) for when you will actually get beyond the waiting room. Just last week our ultrasound appointment was 45 minutes behind schedule and two weeks before that the Obstetrician was over 60 minutes late for a 10 am appointment... Why Being Late is Rude I was hoping to find a solid link for this section that clearly explained why being late is rude but that turned out to be harder than I expected. It seems that most articles I could find take the fact ...

Valuation Today Like most things associated with professional sports there are lots of opinions on how much athletes get paid. Unfortunately, there are very few people who have ever been trained in valuing anything so these opinions don't tend to be very good. Just look at  this article where the author barely even bothers to produce comps (comparable player contracts) to justify his assertions - mostly he just talks about how bad the players are. Other opinions at least tend to be based on comparables, like this one , but often the players chosen don't work very well because they were signed at different times, have different free agent statuses, or they simply omit players that don't conform with the view they are trying to prove. My favourite comments on this subject though come from people who aren't fans and just want to moralize on why athletes are paid so much ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orhFVgzI_bw Prior to the Salary Cap Bef...

Who Cares? Although the subject of electoral systems would usually make for a terrible blog post and the act of bringing this subject up should get you "un-invited" from dinner parties, the fact that Canada's newest Prime Minister wants to change Canada's system makes it worth talking about. It's also worth writing about because it seems  that our new Prime Minister is not considering my favourite system (status quo) as an option. How Does Our System Work Today? Today, Canada uses the "First-Past-the-Post" system (hereinafter referred to as FPTP) where the individual with the most votes (regardless of how many or what percent) in each riding is elected. Based on the countries that use this system (UK, US, Canada, India, etc.) I'm guessing the modern version of this system originated in the UK and was passed to commonwealth countries but I can't seem to find a solid reference for this theory...regardless of where it came from the idea for ...