Blessed by the Potato

PEI has always been a bit of a funny place out on its own. Part of its unique character was the fact that you couldn’t get pop in cans out there. Oddly enough, juice did come in cans, but anything carbonated had to come in a bottle. A lot of people bristled against this, and one of the most common things to buy when on an excursion to New Brunswick was a couple of cases of Coke, but the system worked for the most part. The bottle deposits were fairly hefty — 30 cents for a 750 mL bottle IIRC, and as much as $2 for a 2L (which are no longer around because they were frickin heavy) — which is I think part of why it worked so well. Ontario also has a bottle return system (though it’s been several decades since pop or juice came in returnable containers) run by the Beer Store, which does a half-decent job of reusing the bottles; and reusing them is much more efficient than throwing them in the recycling. However, the deposits have really not kept up with the times, and far too often people simply throw their bottles into the recycling, where rather than be rinsed and refilled, they are smashed, melted down, and reformed (which, as you can imagine, takes a lot more energy). At 10 cents a bottle though, only serious drinkers with a full case (which is, from the looks of the stats, about 90% of beer drinkers) and a car tend to bother bringing them back — I know that even though I’m probably going to be close to the Beer Store tomorrow, I’m not going to bother trying to return the two bottles that were left at my house after the long weekend party for a lousy 20 cents.

The bottles are so near worthless that drunken kids throw them just for the sheer idiotic hell of watching them smash, never mind the dangerous broken glass. Which is, unfortunately, a nasty side effect of a bottle economy, and one of the main reasons PEI is now phasing out its bottle system and allowing cans back on the island (though from what I just saw in the grocery store, the 2L plastic bottles are more popular than the cans). With pop in bottles, the danger is amplified by the fact that kids can have access to them, knock them off store shelves or out of the fridge. Kids are clumsy. Adults (and who else is allowed to drink beer or liquor) should be able to handle not breaking bottles — even drunk adults (ideally, anyway). So here’s what I think: we should increase the bottle deposit to make beer bottles worth something again. The deposit in Ontario has been a dime for as long as I can remember — decades, at least. To keep up with inflation, that should have tripled to over 30 cents by now. To account for the fact that people are perhaps a little lazier and/or more smash-happy these days, and for the fact that the bottle deposit probably won’t be touched (if we do change it now) for another 3 decades, I propose that we increase the bottle deposit to an even buck.

I used to love Hershey’s Special Crisp: a chocolate bar with peanut butter rice crisps, a thin layer of caramel, covered in milk chocolate. It may just have been the perfect chocolate bar. For whatever reason, they discontinued it many many years ago here in Canada. In the States, that bar has continued as the Whatchamacallit. I was in a Rite Aid store the other day specifically looking for this wonderful chocolate bar, and found to my great pleasure that it was on sale at 3 for a dollar — a better deal even than buying chocolate bars in bulk from Costco back home. I bought 15 bars pretty much cleaning them out, and they are every bit as glorious as I remember Special Crisp being.

Now I’m contemplating going back for more, though according to their website the sale ended yesterday, and it would cost me over $5 to take the trolley down. I kind of wish I had bugged the clerk to get another box for me to really clean them out, but there were like 8 people waiting in line behind me that day. So now I’m going to try to see if someone in the states would be willing to buy a box or three and ship them up to Canada for me (I found a company a few years back that offered to this, specifically selling chocolates and candies not available in Canada, and the cost was like $1.50 per bar; it’s good, but not that good).

In other news, the conference has ended and I won a student presentation award :) The internet is back up after going so long without it. I don’t think I’ve gone 3 days without internet access since the 90’s.

We went tried to go surfing yesterday, but were only so successful. The place we went to offered lessons for something like $75 per person, but of course we didn’t make an appointment so we couldn’t do that. However, the rental place did give us a board and a wetsuit for $17 and let us make fools of ourselves. I think we were almost as successful doing that as we could have been with a short lesson, no matter how professional. Nearly everyone managed to get up on top of the surfboard in a standing position, if only briefly, while I alone seemed to have trouble just riding the wave on my stomach. I kept getting off balance and flipping around, sometimes hitting my head on the surf board as I was plunged underwater. Despite stating repeatedly that there were going to be plans to go out last night, everyone just went to bed after getting back from a day of being thrashed by the waves. I’m trying to figure out what to do with my last bit of time here, and I think I’m going to go to the San Diego zoo. I’ve got 600 MB of space left on my camera, so hopefully that’s enough to get a lot of shots of the wildlife :)

San Diego’s been a bit of a hole. We’re staying at the Town and Country Hotel and the place is like a ghetto of little two-storey motel buildings all together. Our room in particular appears to be the worst of all — there is no sound insulation and the blinds don’t quite close all the way. Combined with the fact that we are under the outdoor stairs to the 2nd level and don’t even have the immaculate parking lot view of the other units but instead stare directly into a noisy ice machine and brightly-lit Pepsi dispensary, it made the night rather hellish.

The conference chose this place purely out of cost considerations, so I was expecting it to be a little shabby, but some things go beyond the pale. Internet is running at $10/day, and for a place that’s charging us $150 per night I would have expected a lot more than this. Especially since the internet was down all day after eating my $10, and it was really starting to wear on a lot of people who, well, really need their internet fix. Ok, the staff have been pretty nice so far, I’ve got to give them that, but even the conference facility is a little lacking: the speakers in one room have a terrible rumbling bass distortion problem so we can’t clearly make out what the speaker is saying.

I’ve only been here like 2 days and I’m done with Mexican food, thanks. It is kind of neat/weird that San Diego is incredibly close to the Mexican border, I had no idea — even the trolley system goes right to the border crossing — but this mexican for lunch and dinner got old by lunchtime day 2 (chips and salsa I’m good with, but I don’t really care for anything else on the mexican menu). I’m going to have to stop eating now for the rest of the trip because everything that’s not deep fried is slathered in butter and served four sizes too large (seriously, I only ate about a third of my lunch and I was stuffed, not hungry again until like 8 pm).

So tonight we tried to take it pretty easy, sitting back in the hot tub… until security kicked us out. Ok, it does close at 11 pm and I can see how, with the really shitty sound proofing in the rooms, allowing people to frolic in the hot tub can lead to issues… but we were really super quiet. Ah, well, back to the room, to find this waiting for us:

Quel Horreur!!! The picture doesn’t even do it justice for how shocking and gross it was. I mean we were facing a cockroach that was fast and nearly 2″ long.

I want to go home now, thanks. (Or, at least to PEI)

“Gas prices go up at midnight” is something I’ve been hearing a lot on 680 News when I’m in Toronto. I find it a little hard to understand since the gas stations never had any kind of schedule before — sometimes changing prices several times during the day. Lately however, all the stations over a very large region seem to have exactly the same price, and, apparently, timing of price increases. On PEI, that makes sense since they have regulated prices with pre-announced weekly price changes, but there’s no such thing in Toronto…

For those following along with my adventures in investing, May was a fairly interesting month. I last left off lamenting about Migao, which was in the pits for no real reason I could understand. It recovered a bit since then, and then there was an earthquake in China and Migao said that they hadn’t suffered any damage but were shutting down for a day just in case. Not fully trusting that, I bailed, realizing a slight loss. Since then it’s continued to rally, but oh well, I’ll be watching good old POT and wishing I was smarter instead.

Not quite trusting the spike in oil prices, especially since it seemed to be partially driven by temporary(?) violence-related supply issues in Nigeria, I didn’t end up buying any XEG after my update last month, and that ETF continued to rise impressively. Oh well, at least I got a some benefit of oil’s run up from my ownership of the TSX-Composite on the indexing side of things. Speaking of indexing, I’m still proceeding with the currency neutral US index largely out of fear and uncertainty of what might happen with the Canadian dollar. My index holdings are now up to 5% of my overall portfolio, and keep growing as I plow my new savings and dividends into them.

GE has slid a little further since I bought it. I still think it’s a good long-term value, and am tempted to buy a bit more to “dollar cost average”. However, the commissions and moreover, exchange rate fees to buy this US stock make me less inclined to give that a try for “just” a further 6% drop. This is exacerbated by the fact that the Canadian dollar has dropped in the past few days, so in Canadian terms, GE is only down about $1 from where I bought it (vs. the $2.10 it’s down nominally). I’m also tempted to cost-average into YLO.UN, as it’s dropped another buck to the $10 range and is now yielding over 11%. I’ve already done this once before, and YLO is already a pretty hefty portion of what I own, so I’m pretty hesitant to buy more. However, there is nothing I can find that contradicts my view that this is a quality company with a safe yield and a sound, stable business.

Finally, the banks are still declaring new writedowns and uncertainty about their future profitability abounds. However, we appear to be past the worst and this might be the time to buy. I’ve always had a preference for Canadian banks, but the risk discount seems to have gone out of them with recent rallies. In the US however, Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) and Citi (NYSE:C) are both still looking pretty beat up. Yes, they both have some uncertainties in terms of how much more money they stand to lose, whether their dividends will be cut, and if/when they will return to taking in money hand over fist. Of course, that’s kind of the point when going out shopping for value bargains: I’m essentially going to be gambling that the market is over-stating the risk and thus driven the share price of these banks below what they’re “actually worth”. I can’t say whether that’s the case yet, as I still have a lot more reading to do on that matter, but that’s what I’m looking into right now.