Category: economics

  • Brexit: Britannia’s Stumble

    “Left out in the cold, cobbling our own shoes” or something like that. I don’t remember the exact phrase, but my father’s words to me leading up to the vote on the Maastricht Treaty left an impression on my 14yo self that has not left me, not for one second, even though it was over 20…

  • Overtime, Wages and Theft

    I know a number of people here in Vancouver working in restaurants and bars, and the prevalence of unlawful behaviour is just astounding. Of course, I don’t mean the staff stealing from employers, but employers just stealing wholesale from the staff. While BC has some fairly mediocre labour laws, it has labour laws that employers are…

  • Alltrials Petition

    One of the biggest problems in medical research today is that we don’t have complete access to the clinical trials that a company did when testing their new products. While this may seem to be an issue of privacy (for the company), it’s more correctly viewed as a public health issue. Why? Because lies and…

  • Unpaid Internships Need to Go

    As the job market becomes more and more competitive (i.e. there are more and more people in the world), people in the recruiting world seek quick and easy ways to distinguish candidates from one another. If you’ve got a stack of 500 resumes in front of you, and the bulk are simply people who have…

  • Jon Stewart, Healthcare.gov, and Ignorance

    I want to talk about ignorance. I mean, I often talk about ignorance, but this post will be about addressing Jon Stewart’s ignorance, regarding Information Technology (IT), specifically as it applies to the healthcare.gov website. I understand that Stewart’s main goal is to ‘be funny’, and to poke fun at the politics and policies of the US…

  • Equality of Outcome

    One of the tensions in the economic arguments about the world is whether we should focus on equality of outcome, or equality of opportunity.  The short version of each reads as follows: Equality of Outcome: It describes a state in which people have approximately the same material wealth or in which the general economic conditions…

  • A Gold-Based Currency

    A gold-backed currency. Hard currency, where the value of ‘a dollar’ (or ‘a euro’) is tied to a specific quantity of a specific commodity. Like gold, one of the most (if not the most) chemically inert solid elements. I think this is a great idea, with minimal downsides.

  • Giving Back

    Sometimes you read something so poorly written that it leaves you wondering ‘how the hell did this get published?’ But then you notice that it was in a business magazine, and all is explained. A recent example of this kind of drivel is “Give Back? Yes, It’s Time For The 99% To Give Back To…

  • Translink: ‘screwing the poor is our business model going forward’

    Here in Vancouver, we’re serviced by a combination of light rail and buses. Both of which are fairly regular, and cheap. I’ve lived in a couple of different countries, visited many cities, and I have to say that the transit system here is easily one of the best in the world. (Do I need the…

  • Taxes ARE Theft (but so what?)

    One of the oft-made claims by self-styled Libertarians is that ‘taxes are theft’ (and are therefore ‘bad’). This kind of assertion underpins most of the Libertarian position, and also the bulk of any anti-tax/pro-small-government arguments by folks of any political stripe. Unfortunately, it’s rare to hear this position defended as the self-styled Libertarians don’t seem…