The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Here's An Interesting Idea That Could Make Back To Class Fun.

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

Plus, is Big Oil losing its influence? And a plug for tomorrow's Race Next Door, the podcast within a podcast.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily for tuesday of week 25 and we're going to carry on a little bit with one of the themes from yesterday's podcast which is about back to class but this one's a little different I mean I think we were pretty much preoccupied in yesterday's comments and examples from Germany of what it's like for kind of grade school students we have talked at different times about the dilemma for university and college students, and I think I passed over a little bit on this subject yesterday when I talked about my granddaughter who's been accepted to the University of Ottawa, but she lives in Western Canada, and it's going to be awfully difficult

given the fact that there will be no in-class teaching. So she's taking classes online remotely. So she's staying in the West. She'll do it, but it's not quite the experience that she'd been counting on for university. And that's a similar situation for a lot of other people. That was first year for her. My son Will is in fourth year at U of T. Same problem, can't take classes in class, or he's chosen not to,

so he's taking them remotely, which bothers him a little bit. I mean, he's had the experience of three years at university, so he knows what it's like, but the final year is always one that you kind of want to be there for. So he's not going to be able to do that. However, there seems at least in some countries, I'm not sure how prevalent it is here in Canada, because I haven't seen any mention of it,

but it seems to be certainly in the States, but not just in the States, this idea that's been driven clearly by students who have been shut out of in-class teaching and trying to find the best way of doing things remotely, or at least in a fashion that can still give them some kind of excitement about the year and give them what they were hoping to have achieved at university, whether it was first year or onwards. So I'm going to quote this time from, well, it's from the New York Times again. And it's a piece I saw last week that I've been sort of thinking about and deciding to sort of keep in my hip pocket to bring into the discussion at some point.

So let me read a little bit. It's by Taylor Lawrence of the New York Times. She wrote it last week. As the fall semester begins, many college students will be attending classes from the relative safety of their family homes. Others have arrived to live on university campuses with varying amounts of success. Even schools that enforce strict social distancing guidelines are seeing outbreaks of the coronavirus. But some students, and this is what this idea is about, are pursuing a third option, renting giant houses with friends, sometimes in far-flung locales, and doing school remotely together. Call it the rise of the college

collab house, collaboration house. Two groups of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, have rented large houses, wait for it, in Hawaii for the fall semester. Six rising seniors at Columbia University will be living in a house in Portland, Oregon. They're seeing some interesting things right now. Several rising seniors at Harvard are renting property in Montana. There are at least seven large houses that have been rented in the greater Salt Lake City area alone, filled with students from different colleges. Now, I know what many of you are saying already. Oh, that's great. All these rich kids get together and go to Hawaii.

Well, yeah, some of this is rich kids or well-to-do kids or kids who've, you know, worked their buns off in other jobs and have found a way to be able to afford this as a group. But it's not just those. Back to the article. These houses range in scale from lavish and pricey productions to smart, budget-friendly solutions for first-generation, low-income students. So why are they doing this? Well, we kind of hinted at it before, but here's one fellow, Eric Bozen. He's 19. He's at Yale. He's living in a house in Durango, Colorado, with a group of other Yale students. He says, the reason people my age are really gravitating towards doing this is we all want new experiences, but that's been hard to come by.

His reasons for pursuing this off-campus housing alternative are shared by many students living off-campus this semester. They're looking to escape their families and replicate at least part of their college experience. Everyone's been cooped up in their houses, says Eric. We're all looking to do something that's a little unique. What do you think of that idea? Assuming you can afford it. I think it's kind of neat.

And it gives them, you know, it gives them something else to experience in their year aside from just classes. The article says the majority of students renting collab houses, collaboration houses, said they found the listings through Airbnb, where many owners are offering deep discounts for long-term stays. And you can kind of negotiate these things. When Willie was about to go to Scotland last year for his third year, part of his third year,

we went on Airbnb, found a great place in Edinburgh, and I was able to negotiate a really good price on a long term. And that wasn't even in the pandemic. I was kind of in the off season for university. So that's part of how they find these places, people trying to make some money off their residences that they're not using. Bit of a gamble putting, you know, half a dozen students in there, but some are doing it.

And obviously as a group, they've got to have like kind of strict rules about how they're going to carry on and how they're not going to carry on. But here's another way that this is interesting, and this may be playing out in Canada, because as you know, we get a lot of Canadian students each year come from not Canada, but come from overseas, especially Southeast Asia and especially China. In this article in the New York Times

it's talking about more than 30 students from China who attend American universities plan to create a college collab courtyard in Beijing. Wendy Yan, 21, a rising sophomore at Princeton is organizing that group. The students from colleges, including the University of Pennsylvania, University of California at San Diego, Brown, Duke, Stanford, and Middlebury, these are all bright kids,

are planning to live in several apartments that face each other so they can somewhat recreate the American college experience remotely and study and socialize together. Mrs. Yan said, it feels like China and the U.S. are trying to split people apart, but because I'll have these people, I think it will help tremendously. The students can also bond over the shared academic challenges that come with living in a different time zone and without the ability to Google freely or conduct research with ease.

With the websites China bans, I always find them out by surprise when I try to use something and I can't. And that would be definitely a drawback for some in places like China. Mind you, doing some research without Google is probably not a bad idea. That's what we used to do. It's hard to believe, but that is what we used to do. So as I said, what do you think of that idea? I think it's kind of neat.

And I think it's a whole different experience born out of the troubles of the pandemic and you know i i think if you can obviously if you can afford it and you have those around you who are willing to help you in a cause like this, I think it's a pretty neat idea. Anyway, the article that I'm referring to in the New York Times is much longer than the couple of small excerpts that I've read. So if you, once again, have access to the New York Times and you're interested in learning more about this,

go for it. It's called College is Everywhere Now. Catch title. And it's by Taylor Lorenz, L-O-R-E-N-Z. And it was last week that she wrote this piece. All right, topic number two. And it was last week that she wrote this piece. All right, topic number two. And there's a reason I'm doing this. It's kind of out of, in some ways, kind of out of left field for the Bridge Daily.

But I'll explain the reason in a moment. This comes out of Bloomberg News and the headline that was a couple of days ago. The headline is is big oil still a big deal? Now you know the debate that's been going on well it's been going on for years

actually but it's especially been intense these last few years as to whether or not we should just totally get out of big oil. Well, you may find this interesting if you're a believer in that, that big oil has had its time and we should get out of big oil. Starting yesterday, so we're into day two of this, there's just one oil company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. That's Chevron. Just one. Now, you know the Dow Jones

is made up of a group of different stocks that represent kind of the, or at least those that Dow Jones believed, represents the kind of American economy. And so when it goes up, the economy is going up. On that day, when it's going down, there are problems on that day. So why is it just one? Well, they have removed Exxon. Exxon Mobil Corp. From the index after an uninterrupted presence since 1928.

But this article in Bloomberg says this shouldn't come as a surprise. It's not the end necessarily of big oil, but it may signal the start of the beginning of the end. Exxon, not in the Dow Jones. I used to work for Exxon. I like to say I was 17, 18, I worked at the Esso gas station at the corner of Island Park Drive

and Wellington, is it, in Ottawa. That's how I was growing up. I used to pump gas. So sure, I was a salesman for Esso, for Exxon. I was part of the big worldwide corporate structure. We used to say Esso stood for every second Saturday off. Because that's what we got. Or in the really good months,

Esso stood for every Saturday and Sunday off, but that was rare. Anyway, I digress. Exxon's now off the Dow Jones. And as this article says, it may seem odd to remove one of the only two oil companies in the index at a time when the shale boom has transformed America's role in the global market.

After all, the U.S. now produces more oil and more natural gas than any other country. Last year's domestic oil production was up 125 percent from levels in 2010, while gas output has increased by 60 percent. But those figures only tell part of the story and not the most important part. So what's the most important part? Well, a couple of things before I tell you the answer to that question. If you take a company off the Dow Jones, you have to replace it with something. And here's the sign of the times, more sign of the times. What was Exxon replaced by?

Salesforce.com, a cloud software bellwether. And that reflects in itself the evolution of the U.S. economy, even with those current numbers because of shale. Now, the other thing to keep in mind, this isn't the first time they've been down to just one oil company. Between 2000 and 2008, Exxon was the sole industry representative. Before that, you had to go back to the 1920s. For a brief period of two weeks in 1924, there were no oil companies at all in the Dow Jones. The bottom line here is, despite record

production levels, oil and gas extraction contributed a mere 1% of the American gross domestic product last year. That's according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Oil just isn't what it was to the U.S. economy. Man, I think we'd ever say that. Those of us who grew up in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, we probably never thought we'd ever hear that day,

but that day has come. Now, there's caution in that article saying this is not the end of oil. It may be the beginning of the end of oil. So that is something to keep in mind. So why did I tell you this story? Well, in some ways, it's kind of a prelude to tomorrow's race next door when Bruce Anderson joins me and we talk the U.S. election. Are we going to talk about oil? No. We're not going to talk about oil, but we are going to talk about the stock market.

The stock market is one of those things that politicians like to play with, and I don't mean play for bucks. They play for credit. Donald Trump spent the first three years of his presidency claiming the stock market is higher than it's ever been, which is true, and it's all because of me, is what he said. I get full credit for this. When I took over the presidency, the stock market was in terrible shape,

which it wasn't. It was in terrible shape, which it wasn't. It was in great shape. It had pulled out of the depths of the 2008-9 recession that the Republicans had left for the Democrats and Obama, and it had a great run. But there's no question that the run continued and kept hanging up big numbers. So he took full credit for that. With no acknowledgement that he'd been handed a kind of gift when he took over. Then the pandemic hits. And the market has its steepest crash, I think, in recorded market history. And he said,

it has nothing to do with me. I don't take any blame for this at all. My management of the economy through the pandemic has been brilliant. Well, it's been pretty good. Market's back. Most of it, anyway. The deficit, of course, is tripled or quadrupled or whatever's happened to it

with all the money that's been spent. Most serious economists give credit for the markets of the Federal Reserve, not to politicians of any stripe. But that doesn't stop them from taking credit and influencing people in terms of the way they vote by their claims about the stock market and what they've had to do with it.

That's one of the issues we're going to talk about tomorrow with Bruce. How do you play that stock market angle if you're a politician? And can you get away with it? Do most people believe it? Do most people even have anything to do with the stock market? Why is it so important that politicians make that claim or refute that claim? That is one of the areas we will discuss tomorrow on the Race Next Door, the podcast within Within a podcast where Bruce Anderson, chairman of, wait for it, the chairman of one of the country's leading data research firms based in Ottawa.

I'll just let that sit, see whether you remember it without having to look it up. Right? You got it? Okay, well, let me tell you another story while you're still thinking about it. This one is, I guess, the final story I'm going to tell you in today's podcast. And, you know, I think it's kind of interesting because it talks about what kind of ways we're using generally the population to find time during the pandemic to still try to enjoy life

and perhaps find new ways of doing that that we hadn't done before. So here's the article. It comes out of the Wall Street Journal this week. And this is the headline for it. Okay? The Wall Street Journal shares that all trails, a hiking trails and maps database, reported that people are hitting the trails at three times the rate of previous years. The app saw 150% growth in daily active users just in May,

and that's before the real sort of hiking and camping season started. AllTrails, that's the name of the app. But the whole issue here is about people getting outside, getting to the outdoors, getting to trails that they hike on, and I guess also to areas where they can camp. I've never been a big camping fan. I never sort of, I mean, I used to do it when I was in scouts, but the whole idea of tents in the summer, it was never for me. But I know a lot of other people love it and they spend a lot of time at it. And they enjoy it a lot.

And the important thing about it as being a kind of new venture for a lot of people or a renewed venture going back to their youth and finding something to do with their kids is it gets them outside. And we still have, well, we've still got a couple of months of that left, that outside time. It's cooler at night now. Days are a little bit shorter, certainly, than they were a month ago, two months ago.

But look what we've got ahead of us for the outdoors. We've got the colors coming, right? It'll start in some places in the next couple of weeks, but in the major population belt of the country, those colors are still six weeks away at least. But when they start, there's nothing like it, and there's nothing like seeing it from hiking trails. So I'm assuming that the kind of thing that the Wall Street Journal is seeing,

I guess mainly in the States, is similar, if not even better, here. More hiking. More use of databases that give you a good sense of the trails that are available in your particular area. All right. So, final plug for tomorrow. The Race Next Door, the podcast within a podcast. Bruce Anderson, who is the chairman of

Abacus Data. That's right, you had the name right. Bruce will join. We'll talk about the impact of the stock market. And, you know, I gave you some sense there earlier in this podcast, especially around that issue of oil, how it can make a difference and how the different claims of different politicians, you know, are, well, they're really back and forth, right?

But we'll also talk about law and order as an issue and who it works for and who it doesn't work for and whether it can be a compelling issue in this campaign it's certainly what donald trump is trying to make it be it still seems to me that when it's down to the crunch and when the question is asked of you, are you feel safer today than you did four years ago? Are you better off today than you were four years ago? That most people are going to think coronavirus, COVID-19, the pandemic. And then it becomes a judgment on whether or not the current administration has handled that situation properly. But we will deal with the impact of the market, and we will deal

with the law and order issue tomorrow on The Race Next Door. I hope you're going to join us. That's it for Tuesday of week 25. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again tomorrow. Thank you.