RichardGibbons

For me, the answer was liquid financial assets of 40 times annual expenses (i.e. I don't count the house). My reasoning is that studies show that a 4% withdrawal rate gives you something a 96% chance of not running out of money in retirement. To me, a 4% failure rate is too high because the bad long-tail result--running out of money when you're 80--would be horrible. Plus, I'm younger than retirement age so the money has to last longer, and I don't want the stress of worrying about money. So, I use a 2.5% withdrawal rate so that the odds greatly favor my net worth increasing over time. Also, if I get much below financial assets of 40 times expense, I imagine I'll cut expenses somewhat as well. Doing this has a large impact in lowering the failure rate. That said, I don't know what the number would be if I lived in the USA where it seems fairly easy to blow through huge amounts of money relatively quickly if someone in your family runs into health problems. Maybe a 1% withdrawal rate or 100 times annual expenses? Even that might not be high enough to keep the probability of not running out of money above 99%.

The argument is simple: 1. Today we have a world with the living creatures and plants to sustain humanity without massive wars, famine, or displacement of humanity. 2. Climate change is causing the extinction of a bunch of creatures and plants, resulting in effects that will be both good and bad for humanity. 3. It's hard to know exactly what the bad effects are--aside from some obvious things like seas rising and obliterating entire countries. But there's a reasonable chance that those effects will result in a world that cannot sustain humanity the same way it does today and in the same geographical areas, leading to massive wars, famine, and displacement. 4. There's also no easy way to leave this planet for an equally nice planet elsewhere. 5. So why the heck would you want to take the nice situation we have for humanity now, and gamble that randomly making massive changes to the globe won't result in a terrible situation for humanity later when it's pretty easy to mitigate those effects now? (6. The answer to the rhetorical question is: because it's a tragedy of the commons situation--everyone is saying "my contribution to global warming isn't as big as yours, so you should do stuff, but I'm going to not do anything.")

LOL, this comment cracks me up, because it's completely clear that climate change is science and that only CoBaF message board member who is fervently religious on this topic is Cardboard. Such delightful irony.

So, according to this article, in the three western provinces, there were about 85K abandoned wells, and another 122K inactive sites. About 85% of the abandoned wells are in Alberta, and more than 50% have had nothing done to them for a decade, and the ratio is only a bit better for BC and Sask. So, how do you explain the discrepancy between these numbers, and your "there is no environmental liability not being met" and "Canada having some of the strictest rules"? Is the Globe and Mail misrepresenting something about the situation? Is it just you twisting words to lie about the situation? (e.g. "There is a clear plan for dealing with the abandoned wells--it's on the calendar for June 17, 2174")

I just rewatched "Skins", the TV show about Bristol teens with dysfunctional families. It's quite brilliant, but be warned that there's a lot of swearing, sex-related content, and casual drug use, and the plotlines are often extreme and sometimes dark. It's not for someone who gets easily offended.

MGIC put out a press release a while back claiming that they were lowering rates because of lower taxes.

Not boiler, but in early 2009, I tried to get into FDX when it was at $39 for a long term buy and hold, but I decided to get into it by selling a weekly put to try to pick up $1 extra or something. The stock ended up bouncing to $45 before the put expired, so I didn't get assigned the shares. I never actually purchased any of it, so that decision turned out poorly.

LOL, this is a pretty amusing way to look at it. Trump was asking for the moon. After months of negotiation, he got a moon rock. The reason they "wasted so much time" was so that they didn't have to concede much at all. Really, it's the normal Trump playbook: 1. Bluster, bluster, bluster 2. Accomplish nothing 3. Claim a huge victory 4. Supporters blinded by tribalism and ideology twist the evidence and logic to try to support Trump's narrative

Yeah, I mostly agree with this, but I'm also concerned that people (i.e. me) generally look for disaster, so in my paranoid search for disaster I'm interpreting the evidence in a way to support a "late state empire" hypothesis. Regardless, I think the problem is that so much has changed since the 1950s that one can reasonably attribute the downward spiral to many different causes, not just kids' soft upbringings. The cause one picks is probably based on one's own biases. For instance, I'd attribute it to the evolution of "greed is good", morphing from the sensible "people acting in their own interests generally makes for efficient and effective markets" into "if I want it, it's good, so ethics and compassion are irrelevant as long as I get mine." I think the latter attitude leads to massive inequalities and corruption. That results in people like Chavez and Trump getting into power which leads to the system collapsing--a really bad outcome for both rich and poor. I've heard from several people that one sign of the decline of an empire is the rise of celebrity chefs. I don't know if there's actually evidence for that theory, but it does amuse me considering reality TV these days.

Well, or it could be that your hypothesis is bogus and related to your biases rather than evidence. Like, you're implying that the people who grow in tough, non-western countries are likely to be more successful because of those challenges. Yet, western countries composed of people with this soft western upbringing have brought about a situation where the west is the dominant economic force (and probably cultural force) on earth. So, to me, it seems hasty to imply that the western way is horrible, and the methods of less successful countries are preferable.

The call that he was talking about is so deep in the money that it wasn't selling at a premium.

I suspect the call buyer would exercise the call immediately, so you wouldn't get the chance to lend your stock.

There's no real need to refute those arguments because they are obviously blatantly partisan and trivially ridiculous, akin to the arguments of flat-earthers. It's like a fight with a three-year-old. The three-year-old will be full of sound and fury and may even think he's winning the fight, getting his blows in. But pretty well everyone else doesn't take it seriously and recognizes that there is no real threat. There's no need to knock out the three-year-old to prove that.

In case it's not obvious to you, the reason it matters isn't that it's money laundering in casinos. It's that the provincial government is making it one of their top five high-profile political issues. If a chunk of a business's revenue is derived from illegal activity, and the government says, "This is the particular illegal activity we're going to focus on and eliminate", then some might consider that news relevant to future of the business.

When you look at wealth (vs. income), Canada has a big "advantage" in that its two biggest real estate markets are in a bubble.

Well, yeah, if you don't actually care that Canada has better outcomes at 2/3rds of the price, doesn't have the massive numbers of underinsured people that USA does, doesn't have the huge number of deaths resulting from underinsurance, and doesn't have nearly the number of medical-related bankruptcies that USA does. That said, if you're really wealthy, then the American system is better for you. If you're playing the genetic lottery (i.e. being randomly assigned into the body of someone that needs healthcare), then the Canadian system is so superior that it's laughable that anyone would suggest otherwise.

I'm not a fan of wealth taxes, but there are few alternatives. In BC, because of foreign capital, we've ended up in a situation where the people who own the most expensive houses are declaring the lowest income. So, if you want to maintain your tax base, you have several options: [*]Increase the taxes the asset-poor Canadians pay in order to pay for the infrastructure used by wealthy foreigners who declare little or no income [*]Ban foreign investment & audit the heck out of people who buy expensive houses while declaring no income [*]Add an asset tax that will hit people even if they don't declare an income I think #2 is the most reasonable option, but #3 is far easier to do (and I think the NDP government would already be predisposed to doing #3.)

Yeah, it's unclear to me why anyone would bother seriously negotiating with Trump. He's capricious--even if Canada concedes on one point in return for USA conceding on another point, I'd be worried that the next day Trump would un-concede the USA side while demanding Canada's concession remain. There's no reason to hold serious discussions when that's the person on the other side of the table. So, I think the optimal strategy is to compliment Trump a lot, discuss all the talking points in depth and adjourn the meetings as much as possible, but not actually try to negotiate a deal. Essentially, just do what you can to keep the current agreement in place, but for actual negotiations, wait for the next guy since the next guy might want to negotiate in good faith.

Yeah, to change the world, you need to be like Bill Gates--old and well-educated. Wait a minute.... Never mind.

C-25 requires companies to disclose "diversity information" related to their board and leadership. I don't think that companies should be able to even ask about people's ethnicity, religious beliefs, gender, and sexual preferences, let alone be required to disclose this information publicly. I generally don't think it's a good idea to create databases that make it easy to find business leaders of particular ethnicities to persecute. Plus, I've read articles where Liberals imply that if this law doesn't result in the "appropriate people" being hired, then the next step would be to enact laws to force companies to discriminate against particular demographics in favor of other demographics, which I also disagree with. C-51 mandates that in sexual assault trials only, the defence has to disclose their evidence to the prosecution before the trial begins. My belief is that this eliminates one of the primary defences a person can have against a sexual assault allegation, finding contradictions in the story of the accuser. Essentially, it allows the accuser to identify contradictions in their story before the trial and then revise their story to be consistent. What's more, I think trials should ideally be structured in the way that's most likely to identify truth. If this reverse-disclosure were a better way to find out the truth, I'd expect the Liberals to want this law to apply to all criminal trials. The fact that it doesn't--that it only applies to sexual assault trials--to me means that they aren't actually trying to find truth, but rather make it much easer to find people guilty of sexual assault. Thus, I think it eliminates the right to a fair trial. (Since men are the primary people charged with sexual assault, I consider it sexist enough to group with the other two bills.) C-69 says that, when performing environmental assessments, both science and "the traditional knowledge of indigenous people" must be considered, and the indigenous people's knowledge may be kept confidential. I believe strongly that science should be the only factor in environmental assessments. To me, traditional knowledge does have a role, and that role is to be fed into science, proven or disproven, and then the resulting science incorporated into the environmental assessments. Instead, a minority group consisting of roughly 4% of the population is being allowed to influence the results of environmental assessments, and the information that they are providing isn't even being made public. Generally, I think it's a really bad idea to identify a group based on ethnicity, pass laws to give them a disproportionately large influence on regulation, and then say that nobody else can know how or why they influenced any decision.

Oops, I was in a rush and misspoke--I didn't mean to imply that it was this council. I'm mostly referring to bills C-25, C-51, and C-69.

Yep, this is the reason I won't vote Liberal in the next federal election. To me, adding systemic discrimination to federal laws is a non-starter--if your party tries that, nothing else you do will convince me to vote for you.

Yeah, they should totally look into how much money the Green Party has got from foreign interests--the amount would be negligible, since they don't accept corporate or union donations. And, to be even-handed, they should also look at the piles and piles of money donated by foreigners to Wilkinson's party during the last elections. I'm curious if it's 100 times the amount donated by foreigners to the Greens, 1000 times, or more. The Liberals really tried hard to keep corporate donations in politics while the Green Party campaigned against it. Even so, I don't think the Liberals should be persecuted as you suggest, because it wasn't actually illegal, and because I believe in democracy. That said, it amuses me when you think the argument you're making is pro-Wilkinson/anti-Weaver, when the exact opposite is true. I'm guessing that you're in an Alberta echo-chamber, and that's why you get so many basic facts related to BC politics wrong. (Remember last year when you thought the BC Liberal party was liberal? LOL. It's nice that you've finally realized that they're actually the party you'd vote for if you lived in BC.)

Yeah, I find the article bizarre. It seems like he's trying to vilify corporations, alleging that they're doing something wrong, when as far as I can tell, they're simply following the law. What's more, the ethical thing for the corporations to do is to operate in a tax-efficient manner, not paying more than required (and depending on how they paid more than required, I imagine it might actually break the law to pay more than required.) Really, if the author has a problem, he ought to be complaining about elected officials who create the laws and give in to corporate lobbyists, not the corporations who simply follow the law.

Yeah, I agree, and I think it's a extremely strong statement saying "anyone from the west". If a western investor believes in the concept of a "too hard pile" and that companies go in there when the true fundamentals of the company are too difficult to understand, I'm hard pressed to understand why they wouldn't put almost every Chinese company in that category. I do understand speculating without confidence though.... :)