US still winning in labour mobility, which is not at all surprising but still reassuring given the averse impact the sluggish housing market seems to have had on mobility in the past year.
I still think it’s a bit of a paradox that while labour mobility is much encouraged in the US, it still work counter to the goal that home ownership subsidies offered by the government, which encourages social stability and putting roots down in a community. Which ideally, I suppose, will help one anchor down and develop a sense of community in the short and medium term, but not strong enough to keep one from packing up and driving off in search of better lives if the right opportunity knocks on the door (or none where you happen to be).
TECH & TELECOM Dear Hotmail: What the hell happened to you? cracked.com – Somewhere along the line you stumbled. You got sloppy or you just gave up, and we drifted apart. Now you’ve been lapped by the technology and features of Gmail. … Behind Foursquare and Gowalla: The great check-in battle wired.co.uk – All over the web, reward-based achievement games have begun to blossom as a means of encouraging specific behaviour. … Why I sold Zappos inc.com – Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it? …Read more...
I can’t say it better than what’s already been said below. Outrage over Arizona’s new law that mandates citizens to carry IDs at all time has been the way of life in Europe for years.
In America (and really in the Anglo-Saxon world in general) there is a very different attitude toward national identification than in Europe. There is no national ID card in the US. In fact, many have argued that to require people to get such an ID would be unconstitutional. Several states are even challenging a 2005 federal initiative that would just harmonise the way state driving licenses are designed. Because there is no national ID most Americans use their driving license as identification.
This is pretty true. In Canada, you can pretty much get away with a driver’s license plus your social insurance number card for the majority of your bureaucratic dealings with the government.
Contrast that with the Netherlands. As a side note, although I give the country a hard time, I hardly think that goes on in this country is any more paternalistic and Big Brother-like than any of its continental neighbours.
Exhibit one: I had to register with the local government as soon as I enter the country to notify them of my presence. And should I move, they must be notified at all times. For us, address changes are made out of a sense economic necessity and convenience (you want to get your tax returns, insurance papers, bills and home-order catalogues), not government dictation.
Exhibit two: In order to verify my partnership status with my boyfriend to renew my residence permit, I had to provide a not-married certificate from Canada. It was simply inconceivable to the Dutch government that we had no such document in Canada, since marriage is a provincial matter and not legislated federally. With much resignation, I handed over 30 euros to the Canadian embassy for a piece of paper with zero significance, which they handed over with a wink. This piece of paper was then taken to a Dutch bureaucratic counter for a 10 euro stamp to validate its meaningless authenticity. Read more...
Unless you live in an emerging economy where the recession hasn’t hit public finances, for the rest of us that are stuck on the wrong side of the divide, it’s cutback time baby!
In the US, public deficits are still tolerated on the backs of a still troubled economy and underlying optimism that when things turn around, the coffers will fill up again. In Europe, there’s little room for such fantastically sanguine outlook. From Club Med countries that are now forced to scale back, to Britain where deficit reduction debates as one of the driving issues of next week’s election, to the northern Calvinists and Lutherans where austerity is once again on the “in” word, public spending cuts is the inevitable future.
When public spending cuts took place in Canada back in the 90s, we had school strikes every other year, and public transit strike pretty much every single year. Now the talks of cutbacks is happening again both in Canada – conservative, considering we’ve ran current account surpluses for the past 12 years, as well as here in the Netherlands.
Here are some of the ideas brain-stormed so far, the most contentious ones are the most universal – namely, healthcare and mortgage interest deduction.
Let me quickly go over both.
Healthcare reforms during the past decade have made healthcare a considerable cost in every family’s budget here in the Netherlands. During the American health reform debates, the Dutch healthcare system was held up as the system to aspire to. Coming from the land of universal (and more or less free) healthcare, I beg to differ.
In Canada (and to a lesser extent also in America), healthcare is a cost shared between the government and businesses that employ individuals. Those of us from the system knows that a job is not a job unless it comes with “benefits”, which in my experience, includes coverage for all preventative and curative dental, optometrist and other rehabilitative care. But all is not perfect. In recent years, a number of provinces in Canada now require a yearly income-tested payment from its residents, at no more than a few hundred dollars a year. Read more...
I don’t normally write about Canada, usually because it is always blissfully uneventful back home. But it looks as though I missed out on a couple of pieces of news the past week that might have suggest almost certain changes in the Canadian healthcare system for the foreseeable future (h/t to my mom!).
First off, facing steep demographic declines and consecutively higher spending on health care for the past decades, the government of Quebec has proposed a $25-per-visit charge for doctor’s visit.
While I am not all that familiar with Quebec’s health-care system, as each province has the mandate to run its own, the concept of paying (somewhat) for healthcare is no longer new to the rest of the country. A number of provinces, including Ontario, for the past few years, has put in place an income-based healthcare contribution, usually paid at tax times. The amount is income-tested, and does not exceeds more than a few hundred dollars even for the richest. However, the idea of a per-visit co-pay rings a bit too American to most Canadians, but that’s really the least of our worries here.
What it does signify is a shift in practice from the ideals of universal healthcare, so troubling to some that some claim it contravene the Canada Health Act. Whether that will be challenged in a court of law once the law comes into place is still to be seen. But what the proposals do reflect is the economic realities of our times – more pensioners supported by a healthcare system buckling under its weight.
The rest of the country is watching this development with keen interest and little smugness, knowing fully well that despite appearance of healthy budgets, we are all going down that road of re-visiting the feasibility of free health care, with Quebec leading the pack.
The second piece of news has to do with the Ontario government’s attempt to cut the price of generic drugs sold in the province, by eliminating a middle-men fee between the generic drug makers and the pharmacies. Read more...
The Arctic might be melting and scaring the rest of the world, but the Greenlanders aren’t too worried about it. They are fully aware of the fact that when ice disintegrates, so goes the Inuit hunting lifestyle. But that has since then been replaced with the dreams of potential economic windfall from oil.
The Greenlanders are so confident of what the “black gold” can do for them, they have negotiated independence from their colonial overlord – Denmark. It sounds great in theory, but in reality, a clear break from the mainland means a reduction in subsidy, amounting to $11,000 per person, or 60% of its annual budget. That will have to get made up, somehow.
So the island, made up of mainly hunters and fishermen, and with little industry to speak of other than bottled water and dwindling shrimp stocks, will have to muddle through the most accursed problem of them all: the resource curse.
[T']here’s the fear that Greenland could become the Nigeria of the Arctic, another victim of the so-called resource curse, in which oil wealth triggers a downward spiral toward dysfunctional dictatorship.
Really? That’s all you can say about it?
The resource curse is one of those economic conundrums that almost every resource-rich country, even developed ones like Canada, falls victim to. Resource misallocation, misspending, corruption, undiversified economies, run on its currency and subsequent inflation, unstable growth, rising inequality, and eventually, just plain running out of the stuff!
So far, the only country that’s emerged triumphant from the mixed blessing of oil, is Norway.
And they were fortunate in part because “they are completely incapable of getting carried away by the oil dream.”
So the Greelanders have a lot to learn. That is, when they find the oil. And if they do, I can’t see how this can possibly end well.
Below, an excellent documentary if you haven’t seen it yet, the effect of climate change on Greenland soil.
I’m always interested in how cultures affect the way we organize ourselves politically and economically. See how Germany, Norway, and Canada are faring this recession. The actions and reactions are results of something more deep-rooted than a wholesale application of capitalism.
Then I stumbled upon a number of older articles on what it meant to be an introvert. A fellow Twitterer pointed me to more evidence that as a marginalized and misunderstood group, we have done pretty well as far as corporate ladder-climbing and entrepreneurships go.
And there’s Elizabeth Edwards, whom captivated my interest by going on an explicable press rampage. A good wife, a manipulative and vengeful woman, a good mother and protective hen, or none of the above?
Moving on to the broader question of happiness, the Atlantic’s cover story lends a peek.
As a compliment to this existential and heavy topic, check out what the future has in store for us at WolframAlpha and Japan’s robotic nation.
Germans practice their love of order much the same way its southern neighbours practice spontaneity. Perhaps to compensate for its wartime chaos, perhaps to merely find another outlet for this distinct cultural characteristic, the Germans have carried out the same stoic application of rules in its current dealings with the financial crisis. Economic and political decisions arise out of centuries of cultural back-drop, and are not something one easily transposes.
The Norwegians, on the other hand, have channeled their frugality and contrarian mindset to duck investments that many of its European counterparts have plunged themselves into. It helps that they are rich in oil. But not everyone is managing their oil revenue the same way. Read more...
When I first moved to Calgary to work in the oil and gas industry in early 2006, it was right around the top of the property boom, and affordable housing was next to impossible to find. Not wanting to shell out half my salary for an apartment, and spending months to fill it up with furniture, I decided to go the room rental route.
Little did we know at the time, but towards the end of 2006, the market was slowly but surely moving from sellers’ to one that favoured buyers. Ones in the know, i.e. people with family members that dabbled in real estate, already sold in late 2005 or early 2006. But the media and the rest of us general public have always been slow to catch on. And you wouldn’t know, from the construction buzz around the city, to the countless “For Help” signs hanging haplessly outside shop windows, to stories of McDonald’s and Starbucks paying upward of $14 an hour plus benefits to attract and retain employees.
My second landlord, a sweet spinster in her 60s, believed in the power of real estate as much as she believed in the miracle that is modern medicine. She credited her various real estate investments for her comfortable lifestyle, despite not having worked out of her home for more than decade. Her piece of advice to any young-uns that cross her path, is the adage that we should all invest in real estate sooner rather than later. I can’t blame her or others her generation for their spectacular confidence in the strength of the housing market. Their experience of ever-rising property prices facilitated that expectation. It certainly looked good at the time, with housing prices that doubled within a few years. Houses that were hardly 1,000 square feet would go for 400,000 to 500,000 dollars in certain parts of the city. The gains were ludicrous. And the whole town was drunk on the sudden discovery that, thanks to oil sands in their back yards, a lot of them were paper millionaires! Read more...
A while ago, I looked at some of the worst-hit countries from the global financial storm, and concluded that on a scale of bad to deplorable, the US hardly the worst off. No crystal ball can readily foretell which regions will emerge from the crisis unscathed, but I am bullish on Canada in the medium to long term. Here’s why.
Sounds banks, no bailouts
Some say it was the far-sightedness, wisdom and conservatism that prevented the Canadian banks from participating in the madness that was the sub-prime securitization in the US. Many European banks were not so lucky. Financial institutions from Ireland, England, Iceland, to Belgium and Germany bit off more than they could chew from the “financial innovation” engineered by geeky American capitalists.
In actual fact, it was more likely that the one should credit the particularly Canadian combination of inertia, combined with a dose of cynicism and natural repulsion reserved for those overwhelmingly dominant American business machines, for saving taxpayers from burdens now haunting citizens the world over.
In 2009, the World Economic Forum announced that Canada has the soundest banking system in the world. No small feat, given both the US and many of Europe’s finest had put out their hands to respective governments for help. More embarrassingly, IMF bail-outs and their subsequent belt-tightening policies – previously a last-resort set up to help the undisciplined and “underdeveloped” countries of the world, are forced-fed to some that basked in prosperity only a year ago.
Still sustainable health care, and education system
Rosy picture aside, Canada is hardly immune from the global downturn. In 2008, even perennial winners and long-time economic powerhouses – such as Ontario and Alberta, reported deficits. In a bittersweet historical moment, Ontario got its first ever federal equalization payment this month. Bitter, because the check is usually reserved for Canada’s poorest (have-not) provinces. Sweet, because, well, Ontario cannot complain from never getting anything out of the federal government again.
Gov't inflexibility and retardation never ceases to amaze. People just get lost when things go slightly out of order: what to do what to do? 2 days ago
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