I think I’ve “fired” about 8 doctors so far. There are many reasons to do so but the most important quality of a doctor is good administrative practices. One of my prior doctor’s administrative staff forgot to call me and tell me I had tested positive for cancer. I had a 3 year insurance battle with my insurer at the time due to that error. Luckily I had scheduled a follow-up for the test which is standard practice for me. Don’t ever believe that they’ll call you if there is anything abnormal on the test. My recommendation for everyone is to seek out a clinic with good admin and also offers a “shared care practice”. That is, you see whatever doctor is available and they share your file. That way you get exposed to multiple opinions. I write a lot about this, consider the following:
Just 12% of diagnosis by Doctor is correct. Value 2nd, 3rd, 4th opinions… See Mayo study for more details on the study – click here. More on my post here.
Death from health related administrative errors is 10x the rate of automobile accidents and the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA after heart disease and cancer (see Consumer Reports May 4, 2016). See more at my post here.
Think twice about handing over the responsibility for your health to the health system. They are not god; it’s a partnership where the responsibility rests solely with you. Not your doctor. Consumer Reports on Health reported in their June 2016 issue “… doctors continue to recommend treatment even when newer evidence suggests they shouldn’t. In fact, research shows that it can often take some doctors years, even decades, to give up old therapies after studies show them to be ineffective or dangerous.” More on my post here.
Bring a Health Advocate With You When Using Health Care. Consumer Reports on Health (April 2015 issue page 2) agrees that it is “… one of the keys to a safe and comfortable experience.” What is an advocate? See my post here.
Stay out of hospitals if at all possible! 11% of people picking up hospital based infections die. See more on my post here.
Be aware that our culture’s go to treatment is via drugs. Consumer Reports explains the love affair with prescription medication and the dangers of too many medications here. Statistically the problem costs the USA $200B per year, 1.3M/year hospital visits and 10% of those resulting in death. Your doctor may encourage medication. I recommend doing your research and discussing with them non drug options. My own experience is that long term drug use is nearly never the best option and usually indicates a major issue which I’ve also found have been correctable via non-drug therapies. Long term drug use could also be an indication that you are speaking to the wrong specialist (possibly right field, but wrong person).
Understand what “informed consent” means and demand an informed consent discussion from your doctor. Consumer Reports on Health explains more in their Sept 2017 issue which can be viewed here.
Understand how doctors are compensated. A “Fee-for-service” model encourages volume and doesn’t incentivize doctors to help patients with complex problems. That’s the problem we have here in Alberta, Canada with government funded healthcare. You can read more about that here.
Just 12% of diagnosis by Doctor is correct. See Mayo study for more details on the study – click here.
Don’t forget doctors are just one expert on your team. Value 2nd, 3rd and fourth opinions and hopefully those include other disciplines. General practitioners favor dispensing drugs, surgeons favor surgery, etc…. there are alternative therapies that don’t include drugs (and side effects).
More on my posts about doctor / patient relationships here.
As another blogger puts it, an issue that has “two bitterly feuding camps” and further compares it to the “…great ‘under’ or ‘over’ toilet paper debate.” I have a feeling that the blogger is Australian so here’s a Canadian (specifically Calgary), pro / con list for back-in:
Pros:
Safety – Apparently it’s safer. So you see a lot of SUVs and trucks doing this. Because, face it, SUVs and trucks have less visibility.
You can pull out faster – Great if you’re robbing the place! Personally I like to get in the store quicker to get in front of that person who doesn’t have kids and is going to dicker in front of us while in the checkout line while my kids try to tear the place apart… (you know who you are!)
Cons:
Groceries – How do you get into your trunk with another vehicle crammed against the trunk lid?
Parking – In Calgary the parking authority can’t see your license plate to confirm if you’re legally parked (in the fancy new online parking system) – so you could get fined and even towed.
Police – In Alberta your license plate is only on the back. If you’re backed in, it looks like you’re hiding something. The police have to get out of their car when patrolling to see your license plate further upsetting them.
Winter – You can’t plug in your block heater: it is in the front of the vehicle where the engine is and the plug-in for the stall is in the front. Which reminds me – when Imperial Oil started managing the Syncrude plant they decreed “all shall back in” and one cheeky Canadian said “that will work until winter…”. Suffice it to say, the Syncrude plant actually froze up for the first time in its history and couldn’t produce for over a week proving again that warm weather people have no idea about cold weather.
Safety – People who are backing in don’t signal what they are doing for some reason? So it appears that they stop randomly and start backing up. In my car, I’ve several times nearly taken their parking space or pulled through to the parking stall they are backing into.
Stall wastage – A large enough percentage of people who back in can’t do it straight. So they usually block off the adjacent stall from being used. This also happens with people pulling-in, however back-in seems to increase the angle beyond what is just “sloppy parking”.
There you have it! In Calgary, clearly the lesser used method is back-in and a high percentage of that is trucks. I am personally a pull-in person as there are too many cons with back-in in Calgary. I have a feeling that back-in occurs much more frequently in warmer climates. Pull-in just seems the more logical way to do it here.
PS. I prefer the toilet paper in the over position. My reasoning is a result of the newer holders that flip up. Imagine banging away in the upward direction on these holders and the paper role flies off…
Let’s boil this down quickly – if you’re a Canadian and you do what everyone else does with your savings and investments you will never get ahead. As I explain why let’s look at what is happening in the USA. The USA is moving to execute a fiduciary duty on its financial advisors that includes a “conflict of interest” rule. The “conflict of interest” referred to is the fact that any financial advisor that is not fee-only receives a commission on what they advise their clients to do. In Canada, this is most advisors encountered by Canadians.
As Barrie McKenna writes, commissions put enormous pressure on the advisor to make sales volume targets and even discovers that because of this “…[j]ust to break even, investors typically must generate annual returns of 5 to 8 per cent to cover fees, commissions, trading costs and inflation…” an estimate from Victor Therrien, a mutual fund industry veteran and former executive vice-president of Brandes Investment Partners.
On a similar “conflict of interest” rule move in Canada there is silence. Indeed David Di Paolo and Kara Beitel, partners of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP counsel against it saying “A blanket imposition of a fiduciary standard would ignore the realities of many advisor-client relationships.” In their article they almost completely ignore the “conflict of interest” elephant in the room.
As one of the Canada Post unions moves to disrupt the Canadian Postal system, I think now is a great time to discuss Defined Benefit (DB) Pensions which is the main issue for the union. Most private companies have moved to a Defined Contribution (DC) system; why? DB pensions are eerily similar to Ponzi schemes moving some to call DB pensions “legalized Ponzi schemes” (where the taxpayer bails out the “last in” pensioner and the company offering the DB pension goes into bankruptcy). FiduciaryNews.com published an enlightening article on Aug 28, 2014 that dives deeper into this question:
What do you think? Do you think it’s fair for a small group of people’s lifestyle to be funded by the Canadian Taxpayer?
I personally do not believe this is fair, and in 1999 when I was offered the choice between DB or DC pension (the last year DB was offered at the company I worked at), I chose a DC pension. In all honesty, I would rather no pension* as I have since learned of a way to not depend on any pension system which I talk about here:
This above mentioned method is both responsible to other people (tax payers) and has the upside benefit of enabling more money to people in retirement than an equivalent DB pension (assuming the person starts the strategy when they enter the workforce and let it run for 25+ years like a DB pension would do). The method has been stress tested by people who have lived on the poverty line and still were able to use the strategy successfully.
* Pensions in the truest sense are government legislated rules to force people to save for retirement; the underlying assumption is that people are not capable of being responsible for their own future. Therefore, the government needs to step in with rules so people don’t blow their own foot off and leave the government and other people with a huge liability as people age.
You know that feeling, “I’m not saving enough. If I could only win the lottery…” That pressure we put on ourselves is unnecessary and in fact, the system is rigged against us. The financial system itself is intent first on accumulating money, second (or even third) is to make a profit for you.
How The Financial System Delays Retirement
Long-time investment advisor Adam O’Dell spills the beans on his former employers in an article entitled “Why I quit My job as a Financial Advisor” with “…I was expected to toe the company line and only recommend strategies and investments that were “pre-approved,”… Most of the time, that advice centered on “traditional” investment tenets: dollar-cost averaging (read: buying a little more each month), buy-and-hold (err, more like “buy-and-hope!”), asset allocation (but just long stocks and bonds). The odd thing, to me, was that our recommendations in 2008 [, a year of financial crisis,] weren’t all that different from all the years prior. The state of the market seemed to make no difference.”
We spend a lot of money on advisors and money managers. The trick is that they hide the cost in a low sounding management expense ratio (MER) of typically 1-2.5%. So how much is that really? I sat down and figured it out. Because it’s a percentage, we need to consider large sums of money, since the traditional retirement strategy everyone expects is big pot of gold and then taking a few coins out each month to live on. So I started with $100,000 but a more likely figure is several million. Drumroll please!! It costs us around $400-1400/hr (or more!) to pay for these funds and the time it takes to manage the money for you. Most people think twice about paying a professional this much money. Here is a spreadsheet which you can play with yourself. Try changing the number from $100,000 to $1,000,000 or whatever suits your fancy. Click here to access the spreadsheet. This then is why the universal recommendation is to only use a fee-only financial planner. One that doesn’t make commissions or is motivated to put you in funds that charge an MER.
Further digging into the spreadsheet mentioned, it tells us why that Mutual Fund or Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) basically treads water. Take that traditional retirement model; the big pot of gold. How many coins can we take out of it each year? Called “a safe withdrawal rate” my research indicates a reasonable amount is 2%. Remember, the fund is charging you the MER in retirement and also in situations where the fund loses money. So add the MER and the safe withdrawal rate together and you have a significant negative trend against building wealth.
The Single Best Investment (AKA “Dividend Achievers”)
There is a better way…. Something I stumbled on to. It has a significant history of success dating right back to the start of the stock exchange in 1602. Mr. Lowell Miller introduced the concept to me in his book, now a free PDF online, called “The Single Best Investment: Creating Wealth with Dividend Growth.” (It is also on amazon if you want to pay for the e-book or buy an old paper copy. Also, there are copies at most public libraries.)
Single Best Investment has also been called the “dividend achievers” strategy and is one of the few (only?) proven long term buy and hold strategies that work. What is it? Basically it is an investment in stocks that have raised their dividend every year. Meaning the investment is not for the dividend itself but the dividend growth rate. Click here for more on “dividend achievers”.
How the Single Best Investment Works
It works because it does two critical things:
eliminates financial fees
focuses money in companies that stay healthy with very low risk of long term downside
Because it is based on a growth rate for dividends, there is a “hockey stick” compounding growth graph. (You can learn more about “Payback, RoI, IRR” by clicking here.) That also means it takes time and is not a “get rich quick” (GRQ) scheme. Other characteristics of this strategy are:
Simple, minimal maintenance strategy
Focuses on key factors important to personal financial situations: cash flow, safety
Still grows if cash flow not reinvested
Cash flow increases through retirement
Can eliminate the need to continuously save for retirement
Supports “rewirement”
Qualifies for debt interest deductibility (an advanced tax strategy)
Congratulations! You Care About Your Money!
If you made it the bottom of this article, congratulations. You are one of the few people who cares that your money makes money. Not many people do. North American society has all sorts of funny money myths, and collectively we subconsciously do not think we deserve it. Have you ever tried to talk to a fellow North American about money? You’ll see.
So what do I do? I have documented my experience and tools to help bootstrap people. Most people tell me they “don’t have the skills to invest themselves” but most people already do tasks many times more complex than investing. To list the required skills a person needs to know how to read, multiply, divide and handle percentages.
Next Steps
I offer a 3 hour introductory course (contact me here) and pay as you go coaching for people not inclined to read the book and do-it-themselves. To date, no one has ever needed more than 4 hours total. It is that easy. The strategy requires some time to setup, but then it’s “set it and (mostly) forget it”; just like buy and hold should be. For those who do not have much seed money and want to know what tools are available to help accelerate their progress, I offer an additional advanced course. If you think investing and saving is way beyond your lifestyle, consider that people making poverty line incomes have successfully used this strategy. That’s one of the many money myths.
About my involvement as a coach: I don’t make enough money from this for it to be anything but a hobby that makes a little money. The other reason I charge is because we can’t have a contract that places the responsibility for investing on the investor without doing so. The reason I coach is because I believe it benefits people. What I don’t do is provide motivation for conducting the strategy although I do discuss the psychological hurdles as part of the course. The psychology and the motivation are the hard part and finding tools for overcoming that comes from countless motivational materials available at any book store or library.
Think twice about handing over the responsibility for your health to the health system. They are not god; it’s a partnership where the responsibility rests solely with you. Not your doctor. Consumer Reports on Health reported in their June 2016 issue “… doctors continue to recommend treatment even when newer evidence suggests they shouldn’t. In fact, research shows that it can often take some doctors years, even decades, to give up old therapies after studies show them to be ineffective or dangerous.” Therefore, the responsibility rests with the patient to ask questions, consider second opinions, etc. And further consider that visiting a hospital puts you in great danger of dying, making hospital visits in Canada worse than the Ebola crisis by 36 times: https://textor.ca/2015/04/11-of-people-picking-up-hospital-based-infections-die/ This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t visit a hospital, but if your issue can be resolved outside a hospital it makes sense to do so.
Empathy is not an effective way to encourage people to be on an organ registry. But simply asking them when they are not thinking about it (via DMV registry) is extremely effective. It works because we are annoyed and distracted and not thinking about death. Interestingly, Alberta recently made this change, to ask the question at the registry, just this year.
Did you know that accountants were hesitant to adopt spreadsheet programs like excel? Or that it took us decades to fully adopt trains, automobiles and computers? Do you think these things changed our lives? Of course! How could we conceive where we are today without them? But it took a while for them to gain “steam” (pun intended).
The situation with the Digital Oilfield in North America follows these familiar lines. It is a transformation that I cannot adequately explain since I only know how to build the enabling technology. How it’s going to be used is up to each person acting individually and resulting in a collective connected effect. Sure, I can give some examples or find people who have done this or that. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. The “killer example” is going to be different for every team in an energy company.
The enabling technology for the Digital Oilfield is called a “Connected Field”. It takes the Oilfield improvement areas listed below and binds them together. It’s the enablement of seamless intercommunication and coordination that truly leverages a Digital Oilfield. Without it, it’s an Oilfield that uses new Oilfield technology – not the exciting “Digital Oilfield” that truly propels the energy business to the next level.
There are so many ways to get a Connected Field wrong for a Digital Oilfield. Even with the right telecom vendors, it’s so easy to say “we don’t need QoS (Quality of Service)” – simply because the decision maker doesn’t know what it is. The fallacy is that there is a belief we already have a Digital Oilfield. There are already real world examples of a true Digital Oilfield using a Connected Field. And they are all in the Middle East; lowering their costs and increasing their supply. I cover a real world example later, so it will be easy to see the difference.
But let’s go back to the beginning. What is a “Digital Oilfield”? The concept was first presented in the seminal study: “The Digital Oilfield of the Future: Enabling Next Generation Reservoir Performance”, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Inc., 2003.
A Digital Oilfield makes the following improvements to the Oil & Gas business – and a Connected Field enables most of them; that is, you need a connected field to truly leverage the benefit to the full extent.
So what is a “connected field”? It is a data communications system that has these characteristics:
Completely and seamlessly covers the area of interest (like cellular data might cover all of the downtown of a city). This allows users to just turn on a device (sensor, video, etc.) reducing or eliminating the need to involve IT to justify a business case to obtain capital to expand the network. It just works. Technicians are not required to tune antennas at the user level. A rig can just move itself and still have full connectivity to all its services while it is moving and when it reaches its destination.
It is a committed That is, it is not a “best effort” network, shared with other companies and people in the area (like cellular data).
It allows full control – that is, it has quality of service (QoS) capabilities to prioritize business critical applications or applications requiring better service to function correctly (voice, video).
Let’s examine what is not a connected field:
Cellular data from any major telco. The reason why it is not is that it has no QoS and is best effort (no committed bandwidth) and may not cover the entire field without boosters (which are technically illegal according to the Telecommunications Act).
MPLS networks – in themselves, they would help if the purchaser buys QoS. If the cost of buying the right networks with QoS was used to price the rent option, it is likely that the system could be built from scratch less expensively. That is, a Digital Oilfield should consider the “rent vs buy” options like any procurement decision.
Satellite – the price per Mbps with QoS and dedicated bandwidth is horrendously expensive. Unless the company (including all teams and phases that work in the area) only expects to operate in the area for 6 months or less, it’s frequently the case that it is cheaper to build.
SCADA (legacy 450 & 900Mhz) – really this is only for “tin can on a string” SCADA data – that is monitoring / telemetry. There are now new SCADA radios that can supply QoS and bandwidth rates at 18Mbps or above but most Oil & Gas companies, especially in North America are not using them. Most of the SCADA radios in use today use technology that was developed during World War II and they have not been updated. We’re talking punch card era technology.
And of course, I hear all the skeptics. So what does a Digital Oilfield do in practice? Here’s an example:
Petroleum Development Oman (PDO)
Connected field coverage: 45,000 sq. km (17,000 sq. miles)
Increased a mature (brownfield) oilfield’s production by 100K barrels/day. At $90/barrel this is $3.2 Billion/year in additional revenue within one year. (Ok, yes, price of oil… but this was done in 2012 – even at $30 that’s $1 Billion)
Reduced drilling & completion days to online from 39 days to 14 days ($1M per drill saved). Including completions, saved $5M per well.
10 month payback.
What does the Connected Field network look like for PDO?
As of the end of 2013, Petroleum Development Oman field has:
6600 broadband connection points
52 base stations
13 Gbps total capacity, the equivalent of 500 connected homes or the bandwidth provided to a 4000 person office building
130,000 end devices
Compare this to a field of that size in North America; there are maybe 10 cellular base stations covering the entire thing. Everything overloaded to the point that it does not work that well (e.g. “worse than dialup” is what I frequently hear).
Together the Connected Field collects 36 times more data enabling more accurate and improved decisions. It delivers 4 Mbps anywhere within the field of coverage (compared to less than 300kbps in some fields available today). You can drive around in a truck all day long and everything just works.
No messing with devices, changing networks, etc. Need to talk to the engineer in head office and start a video chat about a valve to show him/her the valve? Done! No problems. Want to implement an intelligent video system to monitor the flare stack, look for pipeline leaks, identify personnel not wearing PPE, etc.? Want a “mobile worker”? (Please do not confuse it with a “mobile OS” which is simply an operating system built to enable mobile workers that have a network.) With a Connected Field, you just do it! No need to price in a brand new network to enable the business case.
The cost of all this? Less than 1% of the total injected capital into a greenfield area. And if a true connected field is implemented that is multi-use and multi-team capable, the expenditure is less than what they spend today.
Despite the impressive track record how many Digital Oilfields are there in North America? None. Some are close with partial implementations but it’s localised and not well championed at the executive and board levels. How many in the Middle East? Quite a few. Middle East operations have the direct support of the board of directors/families and executives. Would this situation have any bearing on the current supply / demand and geopolitical climate? Hmm….
