Saturday, March 20, 2010

bringing sovereign income hedging to Alberta

I have not had much blogging opportunity in recent weeks, not least because it requires a fair bit of set up to worm through the Great Firewall of China to blog.

But this is quick note to ask current and potential Wildrose Alliance members to contact me at bdell555 [at] gmail.com if they are interested in adding their name to a proposal I hope to float at the AGM in 3 months, namely, a proposal calling for hedging of natural resource revenue. The P"C" government essentially made a mockery of its own Fiscal Responsibility legislation in the last decade, such that I think Wildrose should try to be more imaginative in terms of the legislation it proposes on this front. The best way to control spending is to not let politicians get their hands on temporary windfall revenue in the first place.

Friday, March 5, 2010

in China

Within an hour of arriving in Qingdao I encountered all of the classic Chinese staples:
- a meal for less than $2 (would have been $9 in Japan and $7 in Canada)
- cheap internet
- the guy next to me in the internet place both smoking AND spitting
- the Great Firewall of China

Censorship levels seems to be increasing every year... ALL blogspot sites seem to be censored this time although I have managed a workaround that allows me to post this note. We will see how long this works, but I should have the time to post more in the future assuming this continues and the price of getting online is much more reasonable here than in Japan.

Twitter seems to be thoroughly blocked... in my Twitter box to the right, for example, I see nothing and the home page for twitter.com will not load. For Facebook it is also "Oops! This link appears to be broken." in Chinese. Wikipedia, interestingly enough, appears unblocked.