A8 THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 2012 CHILLIWACK TIMES
Opinion
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Hot potato nobody will touch
The Chilliwack Times is a division of LMP Publication Limited Partnership.We’re published Tuesdays and Thursdays from 45951 Trethewey Ave., Chilliwack, B.C. ◗ Publisher
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Nick Bastaja
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Ken Goudswaard
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◗ Opinion
Small step . . . a giant leap W
here were you on July 20, 1969? That date has taken on a refreshed significance with this week’s death of Neil Armstrong. It was, of course, the day that Neil Armstrong became the first human being to step out of his lunar landing module—the Eagle—and onto the dry grey dust of a Hollywood movie set. That’s if the conspiracy theorists have been right all along. For the rest of us, it was the day that mankind definitively broke, once and for all, the fetters of earth’s gravity and stepped out onto a whole new world. It was an awakening that propelled millions of imaginations to accomplish more than anyone could have dreamed possible. It was a small step that was, in fact, a giant leap. Taking you aside for just a moment, it’s actually a littleknown fact—one that has been pretty effectively covered up, mostly by common consent— that Armstrong muffed his lines when he lowered that first boot onto the moon’s surface. He had meant to say, “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.” But he turned it into “one small step for man” leaving out the “a” which technically changed the whole meaning of his poetic assertion dramatically. But who really cared? We all knew what
BOB GROENEVELD
Be Our Guest he meant, and any nitpickers were quickly drowned out by the euphoria. Armstrong’s giant leap began on July 16, when he and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were fired into space atop a huge Saturn rocket. More correctly, that leap began with U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s famous May 25, 1961, promise to Congress that Americans would be “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” by the end of the decade. Armstrong and Aldrin provided the highlight of the trip when they spent two and a half hours kicking up some dust a quarter of a million miles from home. But Kennedy’s promise was not completely fulfilled until the two moonwalkers (I still think they were way better at it than Michael Jackson) and Collins, who had kept watch aloft, orbiting in the Command Module, returned “safely to the earth” with a splashdown landing on July 24. Just how “giant” Armstrong’s leap was can easily be overlooked
when viewed through the lens of today’s technology. All the complex calculations needed to guide those men through the gulf between the earth and moon and back (without blowing up, overshooting the mark, or burning up on the way down) were done on machines with computing power orders of magnitude smaller than what you have available to you on your cell phone. And slide rules. They used slides rules! To estimate(!) trajectories, rocket thrust, re-entry anglesHoly cow! They fired folks off into the ether sitting atop enough rocket fuel to rival the power of a nuclear bomb—based on slide rule calculations. I’ve used a slide rule, folks (still have one tucked away in a drawer somewhere), and I wouldn’t trust it to calculate a trip to the grocery store. And the real travesty is that that golden age of extraterrestrial visitation lasted little more than three years. There hasn’t been a man on the moon since December 1972. And now Neil Armstrong has gone to join Kennedy—and Elvis, if the conspiracy theorists got it right, after all. ◗ Bob Groeneveld is the editor of the Langley Advance.
t’s the hot potato nobody wants to pick up—in fact nobody wants to even admit that they have an opinion on it. You won’t find Premier Christy Clark sending out a statement on it, or Adrian Dix. We don’t even think that John Cummins is making it a plank in the B.C. Conservatives’ platform. The hot potato? Foreign real estate investors. The folks who have enough money to buy two or three units in a new condo tower, a small B.C. island, a couple of houses in the British roperties. They may be living in the U.S., Germany or China—but they all see a future in buying residential real state in B.C. The average person believes that foreign investors are driving up the price of real estate in the Lower Mainland. The thinking goes that foreign investors have a whole lot more money than the average B.C. resident, and we simply can’t compete with folks who can buy three or four million dollars worth of property for investment. Real estate agents seem to be split on whether the number of offshore buyers is enough to skew the market. Some will tell you that it is, others say the number is too small to have an overall impact. But if you’re a young person who has been outbid by a foreign investor, the statistics don’t matter. Some countries have strict rules on how much, if any, properties non-citizens can buy. Canada is not one of those countries. Some countries charge higher tax rates on real estate purchased by foreigners for investment purposes. B.C. does not. And then there are the Canadian sellers who, naturally, don’t want to be limited if it means reducing their earning potential. There are powerful arguments on both sides of this debate—but, so far, B.C. politicians are taking a hands-off approach. It’s a no-win debate. The real estate industry has a lot of connections in the political world, and there’s the looming charge of racism as soon as one mentions Asian real estate investors. Yup. We’d be surprised to see any political parties take this one on.
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