Random Thoughts

Am I Really Going To Go 'There'? I'm painfully aware of how controversial anything to do with this last election will be but yes I'm still going to write about it and hopefully by the end of this post you'll agree with what I'm saying regardless of who you voted for...so here goes nothing. Let's Start With Something We Can All Agree On What I'm saying in this chart is that there is a political 'left' and a political 'right' in Canada but generally the population is higher in the 'center' and forms something that looks like a 'normal distribution'. (When I tried to find references for the fact that it's a normal distribution the best I could find was  this site  that refers to an academic paper from 1984: Romer & Rosenthal, Voting Models & Empirical Evidence. It's not my best work but an entire country is a large enough population that you would expect it to form a normal distribution and that's wh

Why Bother? If you're like me you hate paying for cable and you've probably had enough poor customer service experiences with different providers that you've switched between them at least once. The last time I went to switch though I realized that my only choices were providers that I had already 'fired' once before...it was time for a new solution. So I did some googling and after a bunch of painful experiences I eventually found a way to get rid of my cable provider once and for all! Now I'm not particularly young anymore and I wouldn't call myself tech-savvy but I did figure this out and you can too. The point of this blog is to show you how I did it and also to show you some of the common alternatives so you can join the  over 100,000 Canadians who cut their cable in the first half of 2015 . Besides who doesn't want to save a little money? What I Did After doing a bunch of googling and finding a number of articles that were useless I eventua

It's Ugly Right Now Due to the fact that I live in one of the world's most prolific oil-producing regions, Alberta, oil prices are a constant topic of conversation. Over the last year oil prices have been low and that has had a tremendous impact on the economy. According to the provincial government, real GDP growth in 2014 was an incredible 4.8%  but in 2015 Alberta has experienced a recession and according to the economist in the office next to mine (Todd Hirsch) Real GDP growth will be  -0.7%  this year. Obviously, going from one of the best economies in the developed world to a recession comes with some hard realities. I recently read that mass layoffs alone (layoffs of more than 50 people have to be reported to the government) were now over  18,000  this year and housing prices in Fort McMurray are down over  20% . So suffice it to say that times are tough in Alberta. This Time is Not Different Source: Statistics Canada Cansim Table 384-003 With all that