I am a bad friend

In the past couple weeks a couple of my friends have had birthdays and I haven’t wished them happy birthdays yet. It’s mostly because I don’t want to remind them of their age since they are both women – ok, it’s because my iPhone didn’t remind me.

In any case I’m making amends here to Tina and Thao – both are my age yet both are younger than I am, possibly due to heaps of Botox or possibly the gym (I will say the former, you can believe the latter – Thao lives in Yaletown so Botox rates as probable!).

I met Thao through a program called “Student Connections” about 13 years ago and I met Tina on the internet about 9 years ago.  I suppose I’m proof that you can have meaningful, long term relationships with women that you’ve met either through programs with sketchy names or through a sketchy device invented by sex-less nerds.

At 13 and 9 years respectively, I think this puts them into my 10 oldest friends category which means if I get married they get invited. How they put up with my jokes which range from racial (not racist!) to sexist to all sorts of offensive black humour (no, not the N-word!) I don’t know but put up with it they do.

So Happy Birthday to Thao and Tina!

Sudden Acceleration

In the case of sudden acceleration you can either step on the brake or shift to neutral. Either will stop the car.

It’s not hard. And it works.

Ottawa unveils smallest spending increase in a decade

Ottawa unveils smallest spending increase in a decade – The Globe and Mail.

The article isn’t the good part of this – the flash widget on the right hand side which shows you a high level breakdown of where the money comes from and where the money is spent is terrific though. It shows things over the past 10 years and there’s some interesting things to see in there.

• Corporate tax revenue peaked at $40 billion in 07-08 and then dropped to a low of $22 billion. Corporate tax revenues now account for about 10% of federal revenue, 10 years ago it was about 15% – in other words corporate tax rates have been cut by about 33%.
• The growth in revenue has been 42% in the last 10 years – I couldn’t dig up economic growth figures but we definitely were closer to 2.5% annually this past decade meaning the government hasn’t actually been cutting taxes, just re-indexing to make it sound like they’re cutting taxes.
• Personal tax revenue increased by 52% during that same time. Corporate taxes were up about 6% in that same period.
• On the expenses side debt charges are down 25% in the past 10 years and this is absolutely huge – revenue up 42% and interest down 25% meant a HUGE increase in social spending. Enough to deal with the aging of our population and the resultant increase in health care costs.
• Transfers to persons (pensions, EI, child benefits) and federal programs doubled in the last 10 years. Social transfers (health care) more than doubled in the last 10 years while federal program spending.

Deficit spending in tough times is the right thing to do but the deficit matters because Canada is only able to pay for health care and federal programs because we’ve been paying off our debt over the past 15 years. The money freed up by paying down our debt has made it possible for taxes to be nominally lowered (they aren’t really lower) and allow us to not make tough decisions when it comes to managing how our social programs should be run.

At a glance it’s pretty easy to say that we have been deferring the hard reality that we can’t actually afford our programs the way they are unless we raise taxes and I would say that’s closer to the truth than we realize.

And the government gridlock caused by a minority government and an Prime Minister acting as Dictator is the wrong medicine for our country.

Serenity

Serenity | Film | The New Cult Canon | The A.V. Club.

I saw Serenity before I saw the show and I loved it. I’ve watched it about 5-6 times since the first time I saw it and loved it every time. If you like sci-fi-ish movies you need to set time aside for this. If you love cowboy movies you should watch it too.

It’s top 10 in my list of favourite movies.

Kitchen Gear: Cast Iron Pan

I don’t consider you a serious cook unless you own a cast iron skillet. How can you fry an egg or saute onions or make bacon without a cast iron skillet? You can’t even make good hashbrowns without one!

A Lodge Logic 12 inch skillet runs about $30 and will last you nearly your entire life as long as you season it so you should get one as soon as you live on your own. Cast iron retain heats, is extremely even and is largely non-stick (if it’s seasoned).

So if you don’t have one run out to your local kitchen store (not Williams Sonoma, it costs too much there) and pick one up and start cooking like a real cook.

P.S. Make sure you season it regularly!

Buh Buh IOC

Despite my anti-waste of money stance on the Olympics I have to admit they went really, really well. A massive outpouring of patriotism, largely trouble free events and some feel good stories. And Canada won the one thing that mattered. We can be proud of how well things well and Russia has a tall task in front of it.

I followed traffic cams during the game and the streets were empty – you could have committed murder in broad daylight in Vancouver and gotten away with it for a couple hours.

Despite all the feel good emotions I can’t get over the colossal waste of money that the Olympics were – let’s rate some of our infrastructure we got out of it:

Canada Line Skytrain – Put dozens of small businesses out of business, built on a budget so it’s already over capacity with limited ability to expand, runs on a route that didn’t need a rapid transit line, killed off hundreds of buses that Translink could have purchased, won’t break even due to the 3P process and we’ll be paying out lawsuits for the next 3-5 years. F

Convention Centre – Way too expensive but beautiful. We needed this one but they should be shooting money into the water as a metaphor for its costs. I’ll give them a partial pass on this. B+

Richmond Speed Skating – Being converted into a community centre. It’s gorgeous but a community centre? Not a good one – it’s located in an unpopulated area with no easy transit access and Richmond is a city with no idea what it’s doing for urban development and this will be a mess regardless. C+

Curling – Are we hosting a Brier soon? That’s the only way this thing proves useful. D-

Sliding centre – The 2nd most dangerous track in the world will probably need to have a modest redesign and why would Canadian athletes train in a place that’s only cold enough for training a few months of the year. F

Olympic village – Overbudget! Way overbudget! We’ll be lucky to see any of the social housing happen due to this so it’s just another pricey condo for rich people – just what Vancouver needs when middle class families can’t afford to live in the city. D

I’d pay a billion dollars to win hockey gold on home soil but we’re going to be paying for this for years and years – the bill is gonna be in the $6-12 billion range for us. That’s a lot of teachers, a lot of hospitals, a lot of buses, a lot of roads, a lot of bridges, a lot of doctors and a lot of debt.

Olympic Drinking Games: Why Vancouver Gets the Gold – TIME

Olympic Drinking Games: Why Vancouver Gets the Gold

This part I appreciate. I would have thought places like Germany could outdrink us.

That’s what she said!

Since I’ve started saying it in Chinese to her I thought it would be useful if we got the other languages documented as well:

Bulgarian: Ето какво каза тя
Chinese: 這就是她說
Czech: To je to, co řekla
Dutch: Dat is wat ze zei
French: C’est ce qu’elle a dit
Filipino: Lyan ay kung ano ang kanyang sinabi
Finnish: Se, mitä hän sanoi
Greek: Αυτό είναι αυτό που είπε
Hindi: कि उसने क्या कहा
Italian: Questo è ciò che ha detto
Japanese: 彼女がそう言ったの
Russian: Вот что она сказала
Serbian: То је оно што је рекла
Spanish: Eso es lo que dijo
Vietnamese: Đó là những gì cô nói

I make no claims to the accuracy. Correct and add as needed.

How to survive RRSP silly season

How to survive RRSP silly season.

You can survive it by putting money away each month into a RRSP. You should only take a RRSP loan out if you expect to make less money in the coming year otherwise you should just start saving going forward and not backwards.

One way or another though you should be saving even if we’re talking $50/mo.

In other news, after losing 30+ percent last year I managed to get half of it back this year. So I’m still down double digits. Thanks George W. Bush.

My man crush on Peyton Manning

I have a man crush on Peyton Manning, the QB of the NFL Colts. I saw almost every game he played this year and it was incredible to see the skills with which he quarterbacks a team. He’s in complete command of an offense – games like where he had the ball for only 15 mins (out of 60) and still wins the game are just amazing.

It’s hard to imagine football being played any better than by him right now.