nodnub

it is a great deal. $1.25 per issue, when it is closer to $8 CAD at the newsstand. I just don't have the time to read it every week.

Hi Viking, don't forget that The Economist comes out weekly. That offer is $15 for the first 12 issues (which will come in about 3 months) after which they charge $36 every 3 months (= $144/year). Within the last year or so they switched to offering all the content online for free (there used to be a lot of restricted paid content). Kind of nice to have a paper copy sometimes though. Cheers!

I agree - I intended that to come across as one aspect of my comment.

Q: What type of fibres can you run? A: Many types of virgin and recycled natural cellulose fibres including wood, bagasse, kenaf, hemp, palm, etc.

nelis, You may well be right. I guess we will have to revisit this in 5 or 10 years and see. Speech recognition is much harder to do when the input is any word from the OED or random acronyms (for instance a technical manual). However, when you are only looking for businesses or attractions in your neighbourhood you have a much smaller known dictionary to match against with higher weightings. Their are lots of smart engineers seeking such shortcuts to make these things work well. (consider dictionary size for predictive text input on cell phones). I agree that we won't be using our phones to dictate and (speech to text) complex documents for a while yet, but great improvements have been made. Last year I tried out the speech recognition module that comes for free with Office 2003. After voice training it for 5 minutes it was already giving me accuracy far higher than 90%. PC system sleep has obviously been around for a long time. My point is that ACPI sleep and hibernate functions actually WORK on most computers now... without totally crashing when you try to wake it up (as was common with PCs in the past 12 or 13 years). Improvements in hard disk access speed and introduction of solid state drives significantly improves PC wake-up times. This may be old hat to you.. but I think a lot of people aren't aware of this. They will realize it in the next 5 years and it will change the way people use their computers. it will become a much more spontaneous interaction. Easier than, for instance, pulling a book out of a drawer.

In 5 years this information will all be on google. menus too. The paper Yellow Pages is useful if you are stuck in a hotel room with no web enabled cell phone or no computer but usually I am looking for highly targeted local results. For instance: all the greek or italian restaurants within 10 blocks of my location. Google maps makes this visual and instantaneous. I haven't used yellow pages since about 2005. Most computers these days support sleep functions and can wake up within a few seconds. People leave them running in this low power state all day, instead of turning them completely off and on (which, I'll admit, is slow). In ten years web-enabled cell phones will be the rule rather than the exception, and you will speak your search query into your phone instead of typing it. The technology is already developed. It just needs to be refined and trickle down to the majority of users. In ten years, most of the people who are now over 50 will then be over 60. They will be using the net just as much as everyone else to keep up to date with photos and video calls with their grandkids. They will get dragged onto the tech bandwagon whether they want to or not. I predict that more people in this age group become very tech savvy, and they will use computers for a lot more than they have in the past. In summary, I don't have a lot of hope for YLO as a long term investment. At some price even a declining business will be attractive but I think the online offering of YLO is going to be absolutely destroyed by Google, Yahoo, MSFT, and other as-of-yet-unborn tech companies which will find ways of mining all that data automatically, and presenting it in a much more useful fashion. This won't happen overnight, and not everyone will use online instead of paper--but I think that only a minority will use YLO official online offering and a small and shrinking minority will use paper copy YP.

I am not a fan of unions in their present incarnation and I hope to never have to work for one. They stifle innovation, prevent the advancement of the able, and make it hard to get rid of bad workers. With that said, I still think they have an important role in our society. I do not think unions are to blame for GM and Chrysler's problems. The job of a union is to always push for greater worker benefits. The job of management is to push back and make rational compromises that will serve the business well in the long term. GM and Chrysler were bankrupted by weak and shortsighted management from the glory days of those companies that agreed to the union demands for "Cadillac" class health plans for their workers and too many other labour restrictions, preventing those businesses from showing flexibility in the face of adverse conditions. In some cases, perverse government incentives and tax credits have further exacerbated the problem.

Sam's Club is a small piece of the puzzle in Canada and was only in Southern Ontario. They are building new WM supercenters in other parts of Canada. Wal-Mart Canada to close Sam's Club stores Last Updated: Friday, February 27, 2009 | 7:13 AM ET Wal-Mart Canada will close its Sam's Club stores in southern Ontario next month, affecting 1,200 jobs. The company, which employs 80,000 people across the country, says it plans to focus business operations on its supercentre outlets and discount stores as people become more price conscious in the worsening economy. Sam's Club is a members-only, warehouse-style format, similar to Costco. It's been in operation in Canada for five years. I am not a cheerleader for Walmart but I have been in a new Supercenter recently. Just about anything that you actually need to buy is a dollar or two cheaper than anywhere else in town. I'm not talking about cheap knock-offs, I'm not talking about the brands I have been used to buying for 20 years here. Oskar brand brooms, altantic bee mops, other household needs like batteries, smoke detectors, socks/underwear, toilet paper, automotive fluids. They are pretty cost competitive on a majority of the products I have seen in there. and the customers seem to know it... the stores here are packed. However, I can't speak for other areas. cheers, nodnub

May I ask what source are you using for these figures? Kawahiko, I am asking you to provide some source of data for your statement. Making unsubstantiated claims does not foster intelligent debate and is unproductive for everyone involved. I honestly do not know where to find reliable "apples to apples" (comparable) statistics on federal debt for Canada and the US. I would be happy if someone that could post some reliable information on this topic. Please note the attached excerpt from the recently posted Gluskin Sheff report. It appears to disagree with your previous assertion regarding US/Canadian relative debt levels. regards, nodnub

would you consider Brazil instead?

WEB inflation comments attached

May I ask what source are you using for these figures?

"If Only Warren Buffett Knew How to Work His Cellphone..." http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/09/15/warren-buffett-could-have-saved-lehma/#more-16385

The trend is that television producers realized that Buffett is human too! :) Or maybe the women are better interviewers. I remember a televised interview with Becky Quick on location with Buffett and a couple male news anchors in the studio that were on the interview too--linked up by phone or satellite. One of these male anchors, Joe Kernen, actually interrupted Buffett while he was talking about something important to tell him about an irrelevant Pharma industry merger that had just been announced and asked him something about the importance of it (zero!). He kept interrupting Becky and Buffett to ask other stupid questions. He looked like a grade school kid trying to show-off their intelligence but failing--except that he was a grown man in his 50's. He came across as a complete jackass.

Klarman might say that a lot of the value funds out there are "value pretenders".

I believe W.E.B. bought AXP during the Salad Oil Scandal (1963) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad_oil_scandal This is during the Buffett partnership era. I don't know how long he held it.

no, not really. Considering the case of Peter and Jennifer Buffet: Jennifer earns $148k as full-time manager of their foundation. This is not a lot of money in NYC where they live. Consider also that Buffett's level of salary has zero impact on his lifestyle or expenses. To some of his children and in-laws the salary they receive may be a more significant portion of the household cash flow. (I think most of the large gifts from WEB over the years are to the children's foundations not to the children themselves).

For this reason, I chose one of my brokers as one the largest banks in Canada (this one is a cash account, not margin). To reinforce this, cash and securities are protected against broker insolvency by CIPF up to $1million per separate account (I believe tax-free retirement accounts and taxable accounts are considered separate). If required to rely on the CIPF coverage I expect there would be major market dislocations that I would wish to take advantage of. Rather than wait for CIPF settlement (and lack of access to my capital) in the event of insolvency; I decided to maintain two brokerage accounts with the hope that I might be able to recognize problems ahead of the crowds and transfer my securities or cash out or to the other broker before the sh#t hits the fan at an insolvent broker. I have not invested in anything that relies solvency of my broker to guarantee return of principal.

Agreed! Thanks!

it's in the linked PDF in the first post. .....ShareholderDispute.pdf

The fact that the website for the domain www.tripplevy.com has a link farm parked page with no real information posted (and is hosted on yahoo) is somewhat uncharacteristic for anyone who is serious about their profession. It's almost the equivalent of not having a fax machine in the year 1990. http://www.easywhois.com/index.php?domain=tripplevy.com For a few dollars a month anyone can get a 1-800 number and pay a secretary in a call center to answer the phone and pretend that she is your receptionist. It's called a virtual office.

Unless Fairfax specifically addresses this in a news release, I would not expect the ORH prefs to be redeemed as part of this transaction. There is no obligation to redeem them, is there?

hahahaha. my biggest laugh today.

yes! It's nice to hear of a pro athlete that maintained himself with dignity and humility in the media. http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/baseball/article/0,1426,MCA_464_5593960,00.html

Does GAS-t accurately track the price of the gas index over long periods of time? I seem to recall that some other ETFs have suffered substantially from volatility and have failed to track their index.