Random Thoughts

Valuation Today Like most things associated with professional sports there are lots of opinions on how much athletes get paid. Unfortunately, there are very few people who have ever been trained in valuing anything so these opinions don't tend to be very good. Just look at  this article where the author barely even bothers to produce comps (comparable player contracts) to justify his assertions - mostly he just talks about how bad the players are. Other opinions at least tend to be based on comparables, like this one , but often the players chosen don't work very well because they were signed at different times, have different free agent statuses, or they simply omit players that don't conform with the view they are trying to prove. My favourite comments on this subject though come from people who aren't fans and just want to moralize on why athletes are paid so much ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orhFVgzI_bw Prior to the Salary Cap Bef...

Who Cares? Although the subject of electoral systems would usually make for a terrible blog post and the act of bringing this subject up should get you "un-invited" from dinner parties, the fact that Canada's newest Prime Minister wants to change Canada's system makes it worth talking about. It's also worth writing about because it seems  that our new Prime Minister is not considering my favourite system (status quo) as an option. How Does Our System Work Today? Today, Canada uses the "First-Past-the-Post" system (hereinafter referred to as FPTP) where the individual with the most votes (regardless of how many or what percent) in each riding is elected. Based on the countries that use this system (UK, US, Canada, India, etc.) I'm guessing the modern version of this system originated in the UK and was passed to commonwealth countries but I can't seem to find a solid reference for this theory...regardless of where it came from the idea for ...

How Much Longer? After my first post on why oil prices will go back up  I've often been asked the obvious question, ' when   exactly will they go back up?'. This obviously isn't a simple question to answer, which is why I didn't even try to address it on my first post, but I'll take a swing at it below. Country Analysis In order to determine how long the oversupply will last it's necessary to look at this from the perspective of every individual oil producer (ugh...) and try to predict their future actions. To simplify this process I'm only going to consider the largest producers and I'm going to lump them together as best I can. A good example of this is Russia. The Russian government does not actually 'own' all the companies producing oil in their country but given the closeness between the companies and the government I will treat them as a single actor (to further back this up Russia was actually asked to join OPEC ). So without fur...

Eating Whatever I Wanted For over a decade after I moved out on my own I more or less ate whatever I felt like. I tried to eat 'healthy' (whatever that meant) but in general I didn't have any plan or purpose for what I would eat. By the time I was close to finishing my undergraduate degree I had gained about 30 pounds and needed to take drastic action. My roommate and I started a workout and diet plan in my last semester of university and over the next four months I got into the best shape of my life. After reaching my fitness goals I managed to stay in shape for about a year until my old habits leaked back into my life and I gradually gained back the weight...the problem was that I could convince myself to achieve a short term goal but I didn't have a long term plan. Making a Plan Two years ago when I had hit my self-imposed weight ceiling (200 lbs) I decided it was time to do something again but that this time I wouldn't settle for a short-term solution. S...

What? For sure renting a house for personal use while owning multiple rental properties is an unconventional decision...but I think if you read the rest of this blog you'll understand why I do it and it might even make you think about how you make decisions regarding your own housing (although I very much doubt anyone else will actually start renting their primary residences!). I also want to point out that I should probably save this post for better economic times as this is literally the worst time to own the kind of real estate I do but I'm putting it out there anyway because it still barely makes sense in this environment and I know from experience that it works very well in better times... Classic Rent vs. Buy Analysis You see lots of articles about whether you should rent or buy in both the mainstream media and from personal finance bloggers. Some of these are good but most of them don't really help  (if you'd like to know why this guy's analysis is so o...

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...