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11月19日 Invest for success!Disclaimer: This article is intended for entertainment only. Jonas does not claim to be an investment expert and he declines responsability for any consequences of decisions made on the basis of comments contained herein. So I've gotten into a bit of investing. I met with an advisor at my branch and signed up for a plan where I put away $50 a month towards the purchase of mutual funds. Now, he had me answer a couple of questions in order to build an "investor profile" and then he suggested that I should take the "Select Conservative" portfolio. Basically, it consists of 65% bonds and stuff (federal, provincial and corporate bonds, etc.) After reading the prospectus and stuff, I realized that the minimum balance for "Select" plans is $5k. So how did I even manage to get this plan in the first place? I talked to an agent on the phone and he said that the $5k thing was just a suggestion but he reccomended that I choose another fund because my current fund was too risky for a small-time, short-term investor (and they consider three years to be short term!) But this seems awfully silly. Why would it be too risky to put in $50 per month but if I were to put in $5k, it would be less risky. If I put in $5k, I would be playing for much higher stakes... It seems that they try to discourage non-rich people from investing, for some reason. Maybe it's cause poor people whine more when things go wrong whereas a rich person will wait it out until they come back up again (maybe that's why they're rich!) In any case, so far so good... I lost a bit of money during the first week but I've since made over 90 cents (making for an annualized rate of return of more than 20%)! This is incredible because it's just a coincidence that I start investing at this time. I didn't purposely chose this time because I thought it was a good time to invest. I guess I'm just lucky. I also asked if they have an ethics policy. Suprisingly, they don't. This is not a particularily hippy-ish thing to expect anyway, most companies have some sort of "social responsability" policy. For example, here's Microsoft's policy. Is it too much to ask that a mutual fund have some sort of ethical guidelines about which companies they invest in? I mean, the use of slavery can probably generate a great return on investment, since you don't have to pay slaves, so they could probably make a lot of money this way but "what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36) Anyway, I'm really excited. Investing is fun and I think I am learning a lot. My goal is to use the automatic Mutual Fund savings program to save up enough money to make a decent stock portfolio that I'll manage myself! I can probably generate some decent returns as well as gain quite a bit of experience in the process. I reccomend investing to everyone. It's just so fascinating. Especially to all y'all lefties out there. Don't diss corporations until you've tried them. Buy some stocks. Get a decent portfolio going on and then see if you still think corporations are evil. Go ahead: experiment with investing just as you would experiment with drugs. Come on... everyone is doing it... ~ Jonas "THE STEAMROLLER" Graham, B.A. 10月29日 If life were like Monopoly...I was looking back at some old posts and I realized that I haven't really kept to my goal of having at least 7 posts per month. Sorry about that y'all! I'm going to try to do so in future. Anyway, I noticed that I made a list of entries that I'd like to do. One of them, in particular, seems like it would be fun. I love board games and especially Monopoly. What would life be like if it were like Monopoly?
~ Jonas "THE STEAMROLLER" Graham, B.A. Exclusivity agreements and the spirit of capitalismOne of the best aspects of Capitalism is Competition. People are forced to offer the best service and/or best value possible, otherwise somebody else will... The rights to compete and to chose between competitors are some of the cornerstones of our capitalist system. However, sometimes, it is sold out for the sake of greed by people who had no right to sell it in the first place. What am I talking about? Take a look around you:
Competition is allowed in our society because it benefits potential competitors and consumers. So naturally, since the right is there for them, it should belong to them. But often another party will sell away this right, which doesn't even belong to them in the first place. For example, commercial landlords are unaffected by competition on their properties. But their tenants are. Sometimes, one tenant will offer to pay the landlord to get rid of a competing tenant. But this is unfair. The landlords should not have the right to do so, anyway. They are selling out YOUR rights to chose where you want to shop or to try to do a better job than the other guy. If taken too far, this could lead to CRAZY abuses. Imagine the following tragic situation: Once upon a time, a small town sold a piece of land to a retail development corporation at a HUGE price in exchange that the town would not zone any other land for commercial purposes, which would effectively make the mall built by this company the only mall in town and if you wanted a business in this town, you would have to rent space from this company. Well, you might imagine that the mayor of such a town and all the counsellors responsible for this fiasco would not be re-elected... But even if they are voted out, the town is still bound by the contract and the company can sue the town for all it's got if a future administration ever tries to change anything. Then, this development company gets a deal from Old Navy to make it the only clothes store in the mall. Since it has a monopoly, they can feel free to jack up their prices because, hey, you need clothes and the next town is over 80km away... And so everybody in the town has to buy expensive Old Navy clothes whether they like it or not. Then, Old Navy gets a deal from Billabong so that they are the sole supplier. From now on, Old Navy sells only Billabong clothes and again, they jack up the prices. So the poor townspeople now have to wear expensive Billabong Clothes from Old Navy whether they like it or not... Now, that may sound ridiculous but it's entirely possible. Our laws and our courts would allow such agreements to take place and enforce them, to the benefit of the companies involved and the small town and to the detriment of the townspeople. Another example of this: Ever see "The Aviator"? In the film, which is based off what really happened, the government was trying to pass a bill making one airline the ONLY airline allowed to fly across the Atlantic! How is that fair? Thank goodness that didn't happen! Monopolies suck! And they should be avoided at all costs. It's a shame that our laws not only allow but sometimes enforce monopolies to the detriment of consumers and potential competitors. There ought to be a law against such exclusivity agreements! I say there should be. I propose that companies should, simply, not be able to make such contracts. Then, the courts would not be able to enforce these contracts because they would be illegal. Now, I know sometimes people would make secret agreements, but they would get caught. It would be like discrimination lawsuits. In the same way that a black guy who cannot get hired by a racist company that claims they're not hiring him for other reasons (not enough experience, etc.) can successfully sue the company for discrimination if he can prove there is no other justification for him not being hired, a company that tries to establish itself in order to compete with an existing monopoly and encounters ridiculous "red tape" and all sorts of excuses for being denied a business pemit, can sue the city and and the company that currently holds a monopoly. If they are caught, companies would not only face financial sanctions but people involved could even face criminal charges as this would be considered a white-collar crime, just like collusion. The government would, of course, be bound by its own competition legislation. They would no longer be able to give massive contracts away for one company to provide all the services across the country. For example, when the government gives contracts to property management firms for the maintenance of public housing projects, they wouldn't give one company the contract for all the buildings in Canada. They would allow different companies to manage each of the buildings. But if one company puts in the lowest bid each time, so be it. How would this work for intellectual property? Well, people are allowed to have a monopoly for a certain period of time on their intellectual property, in order to reward them for their ingenuity but the distribution of such property shouldn't be monopolized. When someone produces a piece of intellectual property, in order to obtain a patent or to retain their intellectual property rights on it, they must make it available or be taking steps to make it available within a year. If it becomes unavailable or considered by courts to be too difficult to obtain for more than a year, and the company is not taking steps to make it available within a year, it becomes public domain. If the creator decided to distribute the work in an immaterial form, they could do so directly, but they must not limit the number of copies available. i.e. If you write a text and distribute it as an e-book, you can set the price and sell it yourself but you must allow for an infinite number of downloads. If you wish to distribute your work in a physical form, you must make it available to at least two channels so as to provide for competition. Once you have a price that interests at least two companies, (the rule of two) you must make that price known to the public and allow a certain window of time for other distributors to offer the same price and make it too. You must grant the rights to any company that respects your moral conditions on the use of your work and offers the price you established within that window, although the first 2 companies can start producing right away. You would get a fixed licensing fee, not royalties for each unit sold. The licensing fees would cover a limited amount of time that can vary between 3 months and 5 years. The term would be negociated between the creator and distributors. For example, imagine you have a band and y'all produce a single. You try to sell the rights to make your CDs for a year for one million dollars, but only one company wants to buy. You must lower your price to $800 000 in order to interest a second company. You must offer this price to both companies and make it public. The two companies get started on producing and distributing your single. A third company comes along within the legally required window of opportunity (hypothetically, 1 month in this case) and offers $800 k. You must also let them produce your single. After a year, their contract expires and the process begins again. And so on and so on until the copyright expires. The reason for this is to prevent anybody from purposely limiting the supply of a product that is not limited by nature, in order to drive up the price. If the distributors act in collusion, in order to get around this, they will be subject to collusion legislation. This would also discourage price discrimination using branding. For example, if Billabong produces a nice sweatshirt design and it costs $100 000 annually in fixed costs and $10 per sweatshirt to produce and distribute the sweatshirts, currently, Billabong could get away with charging $80 per sweatshirt, sell 100 000 and clear $6,9 M. However, if they were forced to sell to at least two distributors for $2M each, they might only make $6M, but the competition might drive the distributors to sell the sweatshirts at $50 and sell 60 000 and make $300 000 profit each. Or something like that. The point is that competition drives down prices and there should be no reason that a company should limit the availability of an unlimited resource, just to drive up the price. In conclusion, exclusivity agreements are fundamentally opposed to the spirit of capitalism and should be banned! 7月26日 On Property Rights...This might not be completely coherent as I am slightly tired right now but I'd like to talk about my position on Property rights. Property is a touchy issue but there are three types of property that I'd like to talk about in particular: physical property, land and intellectual property. Physical property: Physical property is the product of transformations to resources found on land. For example, making a metal object out of minerals found on a certain patch of land... These transformations usually involve labour and people have the right to enjoy the fruits of their labour. For example, if I made that metal object out of those minerals, assuming I had the right to use those minerals in the first place, it's only fair that I can do whatever I want with it (use it, sell it, let other people use it, etc.) Even if I picked an apple, assuming I had the right to grow a tree on a patch of land and pick apples from it, I can do whatever I want with it. Of course, my property rights can't interfere with others rights including their right to Life, Liberty and Property. For example, I can't use my metal object to stab someone. Physical property rights are pretty clearcut. You can't take someone else's goods because they've earned them. Of course, life comes before property and the government has the right to charge people taxes meaning they forgo part of the fruits of their labour in order to ensure that everyone lives. But that doesn't mean that everyone should get a PS2. There is more than enough stuff to go around. Once everyone has enough to live, the rest should go to those who earned it. Land: The only way you can "earn" land is by stealing it from somebody else. Think about it. How did you or your parents or landlord come to "own" the land that your house is on. By buying it from the previous owner who bought it from the previous owner, etc. who kicked the Indians off the land by threats of violence. But even if no Indians lived on the piece of land your house is on, it was probably bought from the Government of England or something. But you say the English took the land peacefully - they just arrived at empty land and they rightfully claimed it since they were the first ones there? But the King or Queen of England got the title to the land even though they weren't the first ones there. They sent explorers. But these explorers didn't dare claim the land in their own names because they were scared of England kicking their ass. Still think it was peaceful? Land is a gift of God. It is not something that humans can earn and own. However, people should be able to use land and so we must have a just system for assigning rights to use this land. First of all, land rights shouldn't be absolute. They should not allow you to use a patch of land for anything you want. They should be limited to being able to use the land for a certain purpose. For example, to farm or to live on. Also, certain common-sense factors should be taken into account. For example, water isn't land and it is a vital resource necessary for sustaining life for the whole community. Also, a society that sells a body of water is shooting itself in the foot because they can stop that water from flowing into other bodies of water and thus get everyone to die of thirst. So rather than selling a whole body of water, a society could sell the right to pump out up to so many litres. Also, since there is so little Arable land, it should all be reserved for farming. Also, people sometimes get lucky and get land that's worth much more than other land. This is often not due to their own merits but due to factors beyond their control. i.e. Who could predict downtown Toronto would be so valuable 300 years ago? But rather than let such pieces of luck keep some people on top forever, through inheritance, we should have land usage rights expire every 150 years or so, in order to give someone else a chance. Note that improper distribution of land can lead to terrible abuses. For example, if one person owns all the farmland, everybody else is at his mercy and he can get away with exploiting them big time and making them work extremely hard for hardly anything. This was kinda how it worked under the feudal system. Since the lord owned the land, he could get the peasants to do all the work for practically nothing. Taking certain precautions, though, the best way to distribute land is by charging the highest price anybody is willing to pay for it. The person who pays the most for it is most likely the person who will use it best. People are willing to pay more for or buy more of something they want or need. For example, if company A wants to buy a piece of land for $800 000 and make a shoe factory on it (which would generate $300 000 per year and company B wanted to pay $1 Million to make a clothing store on it which would generate $375 000 per year, it should go to company B because their use is more useful to society since society is willing to pay more for it. The money that a company spends on a piece of land is usually proportional to the amount of money that they intend to make from it which is usually proportional to the good it would do for society. If someone produces pollution from their property, they are usually damaging somebody else's property with it or communal property such as air and water and they should pay for the damages they cause. Also, when the government restricts land usage rights, they should compensate people for the rights they lost because the sale value of their rights would be less as a result of less rights being sold. For example, if someone bought a home on a property that was zoned residential/commercial that was worth $30 000 and the property was later re-zoned to just residential (which lowers the land value to $25 000), they should pay the land-holder a partial expropriation of $5000. Also, taxes could be charged on the value of land since this only taxes something that people didn't really earn unlike income taxes and it would help compensate for injustices that might sneak in. Intellectual property: Intellectual property isn't so much an actual form of property as a government-enforced monopoly designed to encourage innovation. (Any reforms to Intellectual Property laws should take this purpose into account and be evaluated on the basis of whether they serve this purpose or not rather than being decided arbitrarily or on the basis of political pressure.) It takes a lot of skill and hard work to come up with these various innovations so in order to encourage skillful people to work hard, the government ensures that they have the sole right to benefit from their innovations unless they allow others to (for a fee), at least for a certain amount of time. Piracy of intellectual property (such as mp3 sharing) is not really theft since "stealing" an mp3 does not prevent somebody else from owning it. However, it is kind of like slavery since you're not paying the creator for the service rendered. There are some abuses, though, on the part of Intellectual property owners. For example, drug companies will often change a small element in a drug and re-patent it thus re-patenting a drug that was due to expire. This isn't right. They should only be able to get a new patent on the improvement, not the drug as a whole. Also, patents are extremely expensive to get so people with genuinely good ideas are discouraged from patenting them simply cause they can't afford it. With a patented invention, it would be easier to get investors to invest in the means of production. Without a patent, people wouldn't want to invest because as soon as they start making the product, somebody else might start making it too and thus, they'd get less money, so investing in someone with a patent is less risky. So patents should be cheaper in order to better encourage innovation, investment and production. So there you have it... There's my take on "property". I may add to this later but I'm off to bed for now. Keep trucking, y'all! ~ Jonas "THE STEAMROLLER" Graham 5月5日 The birds and the bees...I recently had the opportunity to learn something. I finally understand how plant pollenation works but mainly about the honeymaking bees. OK. So plants give nectar to feed the bees in order to get the bees to rub around and pollenate them so they can make baby plants. Bees sometimes drink this nectar immediately and they also bring it back to their hives so they can store it up for the winter. Beekkeepers come and take their honey so they're like "Oh Shucks! Our honey suddenly disappeared! We're gonna starve this winter. Oh well. Guess we better work harder! So they scramble to produce enough honey for themselves AND the beekeepers. And if they do run out during the winter, the beekeepers just give them crappy sugar-water and they're like "Damn! We've got to WORK HARDER next summer, we have to rely on the beekeepers crappy pity-water. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Stupid bees! No wonder they're so busy!!!! Cause everytime they manage to provide for themselves we come and steal their food! Kinda reminds you of the relationship between the citizens and the government, doesn't it? 4月16日 Monetary policy: Introducing the hour-dollar! Currently, monetary policy is dumb! What is our money based on? Absolutely nothing! The value of money is affected simply by the supply and demand for money itself. This seems arbitrary and dangerous to me. The end of welfare as we know it...A common component of western capitalist societies still reeks of socialism to me! It's called welfare and it is a system in which people can get paid by the government to do absolutely nothing. Evidently, this is unfair to those who DO work and it inherantly discourages people from getting a job because they'll lose their welfare. What if you get $800 a month from welfare and then you get a minimum wage job that pays $700 a month? You'll LOSE money! Of course you're not going to go of welfare in that case. It can be justified because our minimum wage creates an artificial price floor that essentially makes full employment (where supply meets demand) impossible.
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