Blessed by the Potato

The weight loss plan was more-or-less on track up until Halloween. Then, as a small mercy for my ego, I stopped weighing myself for a bit. Today I see that I either lost the excess, or managed to stay steady through the last few weeks. Which is good, because now a whole new doctor is telling me that all my problems will go away if I just lose a bit of weight.

Canadian Capitalist raises a good question: where are the financial plans? Many people are with advisors/mutual fund sales people who take trailer fees and whatnot, but aren’t actually providing plans.

Netbug asked a good question: what should be in a financial plan? I hope to have some kind of answer to that soon.

Michael James had two posts recently on whether the leveraged ETFs add to market volatility (spoiler: they do) and also demonstrating that two asset classes can be non-correlated (even anti-correlated) even if both have positive returns: you don’t have to have one go down while the other goes up. See his posts for the full explanations.

The CRTC has released its UBB decision, and Michael Geist has a good summary. I slightly disagree with him here: “In a nutshell, solving wholesale UBB was never enough. The retail issues that truly sparked the public outrage have been left largely unchecked.” The retail UBB (i.e.: Bell applying UBB charges to its own customers) issue is what’s fuelling much of the outrage, and it’s a disgraceful, greedy practice in its current form that turns Canada into an Internet backwater. But, reversing the wholesale UBB is (barely) enough — the original CRTC decision to go to a “retail-plus” model was so ridiculously stupid I had to write multiple blog posts and send them a 5-page letter against it. So removing that and allowing competition does at least allow consumers some choice: as much as I’d love to more forcefully regulate the oligopoly (in many markets, the duopoly) of major internet providers, the government has chosen to use competition as the tool for ensuring fairness, and this new framework does allow for competition to occur once again, though in practice that is only taking place at the margins. I don’t fully agree, but can see the logic behind the sentiment that “if Bell wants to gouge their customers, that is their business” as long as those customers have a legitimate alternative choice. The full release is here (it was TL;DR for me, so far I’ve relied on summaries, including the aforelinked Michael Geist one).

Teksavvy’s response indicates that they liked the model/framework of the wholesale pricing, but not the prices.

The Sino-Forest independent committee has released its interim report. I don’t even know what I was hoping to find in there (if it’s a fraud, I would feel justified in dumping it; if it’s not, I wouldn’t feel so bad for buying in the first place), but I didn’t really follow the bits about the forestry ownership when trying to skim it, and I don’t feel much like taking the time to read it slowly. They seem to think the cash is there, which is something, but a few months too late.

SMBC explains why it is that cats know to sit on important things.

Several sites included links back to the book announcement in their round-ups, including:

Canadian Capitalist, though he didn’t add any flavour commentary, so either he hasn’t found time to read his copy, or he didn’t like it. [It is at this point that Wayfare will point out what a terrible salesman I am]. Also, Money Smarts Blog, and Financial Uproar plugged it as well, and I didn’t even beg (much)! :)