u/vgry
Two of the mayoral candidates appeared before Council to comment on the downtown tent city in 2016. This is likely before either of them panned to run for mayor, so it's a good opportunity to see them speak more freely than they would during a campaign:
I'm just starting out and I don't know what I'm doing, so I probably won't benefit much from the features of higher-end DSLRs. I have a limited budget, which I'd like to dedicate as much as possible to lenses. I'm looking at used bodies and these questions have come up:
For example, a local store has these Canon bodies in reverse price order: 7D, 50D, 600D, 40D, 550D, 500D, 450D, 30D, 1100D, 1000D, 20D, 350D, 300D.
We just recently had a provincial election where the right-wing party won despite all the polls predicting a left-wing victory. The voter turnout was 50% (similar to the last election) and so there was at least as much complaining about that among my almost exclusively left-wing friends about that as the actual result. Does the right-wing care as much about voter turnout?
My understanding is that non-voters are statistically more likely to belong to groups that vote left. Similarly, those groups are more likely to be impacted by ID and preregistration requirements. Neo-cons are particularly associated with attack ads, which are said to decrease voter turnout, perhaps intentionally. On the o
I'm trying to make a large number of lanterns for a festival and I'm overwhelmed by the options for LEDs. I'd like to get the maximum number of lumens for 30 hours off 2 NiMH batteries. That means either running amber LEDs off the straight voltage or using a boost circuit to run soft white LEDs. I think a 120 degree viewing angle should be sufficient.
From what I gather, soft white LEDs are generally more efficient than amber LEDs. Do you think this is enough to make up for the trouble of boosting the voltage?
A few other questions:
The advice is usually given to keep your emergency fund in cash (high-interest savings account, GICs, money market fund or 30-day T-bills) because you do not want to have to sell assets when the market is down to cover an emergency. This means that your emergency fund is not collecting the same rate of return as your investments.
If bonds and stocks usually have negative correlation, why not treat selling assets for an emergency as a rebalancing event giving you an opportunity to sell high? For example, say you start out with $30,000 in bond ETFs and $70,000 in stock ETFs. After a bear market period, you're left with $35,000 in bonds and $60,000 in stocks when suddenly a $10,000 emergency a
The Efficient Market Hypothesis basically says that the price of an asset reflects an accurate potential for future growth and risk. Fama and French found that risk explains only 70% of a stock's return and that another 25% can be explained by size and value. If the market systematically devalues small cap and value stocks, isn't that a market failure that disproves the efficient market hypothesis?
My employer offers deferred salary leave with some variables: I can put 10-33% of my salary in a GIC and then in 1-6 years take 6-12 months off and cash out the GIC. The amount deferred doesn't need to add up to the amount of time off (eg: I could defer 10% of my salary for 2 years then take 1 year off and get paid 20% of my normal salary). I'll pay tax based on the amount I actually receive, so the GIC will count as income in my time off. I don't have to do research or anything while I'm off - it's pure vacation time.
I know r/personalfinance is all about early retirement, but I think time off is far more valuable while I'm healthy and my kids are young. But with the value of that being
The Canadian market is much less diversified than the US market. I work in Canada and own real estate in Canada, so any investment in my own economy is inherently not diverse (the same economic forces that reduce my savings and the value of my house may also cost me my job). Dividends from Canadian companies have preferential tax treatment, but gains from equities are mostly from increase in stock price and equities are used in my portfolio for growth, not income. So why would I own any Canadian stocks at all?
The New York Times rent vs own calculator linked to from r/personalfinance is awesome, but it has tax deductions for property tax and mortgage interest hardcoded in. Can you recommend a rent vs own calculator for Canada where those things are not deductible? Or how I can adjust the inputs to the NYTimes calculator to account for that?
AlterNet is a "progressive/liberal activist news service". They recently published an essay arguing that through most of Western history, women were considered more interested in sex and less able to control themselves than men. The stereotype was flipped in order to get women engaged in Protestantism. Do you think there's any validity to this argument? How were the sexual appetites of the genders believed to be different in your period of specialty?
The last issue of Jack Rabbit Speaks plugged this camp/project management tool called Asana that was originally developed to manage the Chillage village. We thought "hey, this could be great for managing our art car project!", until we discovered that you need a pay account if your project has more than 30 participants (any camp or project that needs a dedicate PM tool certainly will). Looking at the front of their site (http://asana.com), I see that they're trying to sell this as a default world project management tool. I'm all for Burners making a living and I think [Burners.me's recent criticism](http://burners.me/2013/03/09/burning-man-org-to-burners-we-own
The question comes up with some regularity in watch forums: why don't mobile phones use sapphire screens? They actually have been used on a couple of luxury phones, but the cost keeps them off consumer phones. Some analysts are predicting that the price of synthetic sapphire is about to drop, which would make it affordable for phones and ubiquitous on watches.
