It’s Never Different This Time, Mark Sutcliffe

“This time is different.”

Mayor Mark Sutcliffe on fixing Ottawa’s light rail

Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett is pretty good at investing. His philosophy (he truly is a very wise man outside and inside of investing ) is you buy good companies that are leaders in the field and hold onto them. The caveat is time. If you don’t start early in life, you don’t have enough time to become Buffett. He bought his first stock when he was 11 years old.

Buffett’s most famous investment is Coke. A leader in its field, pays a bit of a dividend, has good management, knows marketing inside out (It’s the real thing) and will make you 10 per cent or so a year and around a three per cent dividend. Things go better with Coke. And then after the magic of compounding over a great number of years, you become Warren Buffett. At 15 per cent, your investment doubles in five years. Take it from there.

When a stock market crash comes, Buffett holds on to his stock. It will come back. It always does. And if it doesn’t, well then the entire economy is destroyed so it doesn’t matter. When asked once during a stock market crash what he was doing, he said this was the best buying opportunity of a lifetime. Buffett was right.

But panicking people don’t change. They sold.

Buy low, sell high. Very few people do it. They sell low when they are scared and buy high when they think they can cash in on the gravy train. Buffett makes a lot of money off those people.

Light Rail: Give Us News, Not Beans

There is an expression that goes around during the good economic times and the stock market is skyrocketing and people are making money. Here it comes Mark Sutcliffe. “It’s different this time.”

It’s never different this time. If there is one thing of which you can be absolutely sure is that people don’t change very much. Thus the extremely slow march of civilization. Change? Nope. People just keep being people with their usual makeup of happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, failure, success and surprise.

So if the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates, that will curb inflation and because the preponderance of debt in our society, the economy will slump. Some people will say it will be different this time. You know, people said that right before the tech crash. It’s never different this time. Basic, rock-solid, unmovable human nature.

Need another example? Climate change. Good people are out there trying to fight climate change in dribs and drabs. God bless ’em. The thing is, they will fail. Many people cooking dinner (if they have some) over an open fire in the Third World don’t care about climate change … probably haven’t heard of it.

But this isn’t just a Third World problem. It’s primarily a First World problem. But people don’t change. Up goes the carbon and the world gets warmer. That’s a pretty thin layer of air we have up there.

Don’t believe me? New York, the business and media capital of world and full of brilliant people, has flooded twice from unusual storms but has New York altered course? No. The Gulf Stream, due to climate change, could stop flowing as early as 2025 due to climate change but has Europe altered its course. Not really. Some. Not enough.

Which brings me to the next point in this diatribe. People will change when their backs are absolutely against the wall. Norway will change without the Gulf Stream when it becomes Baffin Island. Bangladesh, which is just slightly above sea level, will flood … permanently due to climate change … sending tens of millions of people into India. The two peoples have a long history of killing each each other. That won’t turn out well.

Will New York care? No. New York cares about New York on occasion … sometimes even the whole United States. If it’s not under water, well, that’s somebody else’s problem. Until it floods permanently. That’s people.

People don’t change. They fought the most horrible war in history in 1914, then outdid themselves in 1939. And they will do it again. It’s never different this time. A fully-formed person doesn’t change. Fully-formed humanity doesn’t change. Most people don’t care. So they don’t change. They keep doing what works until it doesn’t. That takes a very long time. Cavemen pounded each other over the head with clubs. In Ukraine, they have more sophisticated clubs. But the basic premise doesn’t give. This time isn’t different.

In the Roaring ’20s everything was great. People were making money on the basis of the beginning of the mass-market car. And radio. And even the potential of the airplane. People drove the stock market crazy, until 1929. Throughout the 1990s, computerization and the potential of the internet drove the dot.com bubble. The stock market went crazy. Until 2002 when the tech bubble burst. It’s never different this time.

When people tell you it’s different this time, it’s time to run for the hills, shoot your food and bury your money under a big rock. It’s never different this time.

Then there’s a corollary of that. Never change a winning game. A few people do, thinking things will be better. It’s a sports adage. If what you are doing is winning, don’t change your game. Most people can’t change their game anyway so it doesn’t matter much. Buffett first bought stocks when he was 11 years old. He held on to them. It worked. It continues to work. He didn’t change a winning game. Buffett is a multi-billionaire.

Light rail in Ottawa doesn’t work. It works in other places, but not here. City staff has been abysmal with procurements and big projects. Witness our problems with Lansdowne or a new unnecessary central library or bridges. It’s never different this time.

Witness the destruction of our downtown neighbourhoods and suburbs in the so-called interest of the climate and thus intensification. This time it isn’t different. It’s just another example of city staff and politicians catering to developers who are hideously powerful in this town. Who wins? Developers. Who loses? Us.

Will the climate improve from Ottawa’s intensification? Nope.

Light rail hasn’t worked in four years because of horrible political and bureaucratic administration. People who didn’t know what they were doing suddenly became experts when light rail fell into their laps. What did city types Jim Watson, Steve Kanellakos and John Manconi know about light rail? Not much. It shows.

What does the current crew know about light rail? Very little. What does Sutcliffe know about light rail? Less.

Sutcliffe tells us it’s different this time. Well, some of the dancers have changed but the dance and the dance hall are the same. The Transportation Safety Board, one of the few organizations in this affair that has no interest in lying, says the parts the city religiously checks at great expense in the vicinity of the hub assembly meet industry standards. However, the basic design of the train doesn’t work in a multitude of ways, the experts in the TSB say.

So the city changes the industry-standard parts that break due to design flaws that industry-standard parts can’t stand.

Former mayor Bob Chiarelli, who built the original southwest O-Train that worked for next to nothing, says this train is a lemon. Smart people are saying it is time to buy new rolling stock. This train doesn’t work and is dangerous to boot. No million-dollar advertising campaign will change the reality of this situation though that’s how Watson dealt with problems. Words don’t solve problems, for the most part. Actions do. Lies certainly don’t.

Why did the train break this time? Well we’re told that humidity and the weight of passengers from Bluesfest caused the problem. Humidity? Passenger load? And these guys are going to fix this train?

People don’t trust the train for good reason and don’t want to use it. It gets them to work late. It doesn’t get them there at all. It derails which city staff at one point said was normal. Words.

The best Madison Avenue advertising people couldn’t change people’s perception of this train. Don Draper couldn’t give this train a new image. But OC Transpo says it can and got a million dollars to do it. That’s the train company.

That sound you hear in the distance is a flush.

Let’s Get All The Extra Costs Spent On LRT

This train has had four years to work and it doesn’t work. By all appearances, it’s a pig in a thoroughbred race. It doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for four years. Get it?

Now we’re using the same people who created this mess to fix this mess. All the words in the world won’t change the reality that this won’t work. People are doing the same thing over and over again, like Buffett, except what he was doing was successful. So he kept doing it. The city is doing the same thing over and over again despite the fact that the same thing has been unsuccessful. And it won’t change.

This new effort to fix the trains won’t work.

How do we know? This time isn’t different.

Ken Gray

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