Blessed by the Potato

There were two articles in the Free Press today that I found kind of interesting, especially put together. The first was on those payday loan services, and the ridiculous annual rate that their fees work out to (over 700%).

“If we’re not there, what’s going to happen? The power is going to be cut off. The kids are not going to eat,” he told the board.

Critics scoffed at the idea, saying payday loans can often trap low income-earners in a cycle of poverty.

“They’re trading off essential things, like buying medication or paying their rent, for trying to eventually pay off their loans,” said Gloria Desorcy, head of the Manitoba branch of the Consumers Association of Canada.

“How do you ever catch up?”

The second was related to the massive sinkhole that hit downtown London on Halloween. It knocked out power for the whole day, and many people weren’t able to work in the downtown core. As a result, two guys who work in a call centre are trying to recover their lost wages for the day. I don’t really know whether these guys have a case or not, and I don’t really care (though I think it’s pretty damned ballsy to try to recover lost wages for the day spent navigating the red tape at city hall). What caught my eye was this quote:

The loss of the wages hurts, said Underhill, a father of four.

“It doesn’t seem a lot to the city,” Pinnell said. “But this bill gets cut and this bill gets cut. Everybody lives paycheque to paycheque.”

[emphasis mine]

Now, maybe this was just innocent hyperbole on the part of Pinnell, but I find that kind of disturbing nonetheless, that not only are there so many people out there living paycheque-to-paycheque, but that some people perceive that to be the norm, to be an acceptable way to carry on your life. I just couldn’t imagine not having some kind of buffer in savings or overtime options or something to make up for potential lost wages or surprise expenses. And the thought that everyone lives paycheque to paycheque makes getting ahead of the payday loan places even more difficult: how can you make sacrifices to save if you don’t even believe that saving is a virtue (or at least normal)?

We’ve got a bit of a mold problem in the house here. When we first moved in, we had a water leaking into the basement problem, which lead fairly directly to mold growing in the laundry room. Our landlord did a somewhat sloppy fix of the problem by spraying the leaking wall with blue expanding foam, but it did seem to keep 99% of the water out of the laundry room. However, the mold continues to grow there. It’s a little unsettling, and from what we’ve read on the internet, if mold continues to grow after being killed back by bleach and mold inhibitor a few times, it’s probably there to stay and we’ll need a professional.

It’s a bit of a pain, but the laundry room is at least a fairly localized, stable problem (and is much more livable after we got a UVC lamp to kill the spores and improve the smell).

The rest of the basement is unfinished, and smells terrible. It’s always had a bit of an unfinished-basement, confined-space, stale-mildewy smell to it, and we can smell that whenever the furnace or A/C first clicks on and blows skanky air around the rest of the house. However, that room has gotten much worse in the last few months. Somehow, water is getting in there, and it doesn’t make any damned sense. The interior brick wall (a wall between rooms, not one that faces the outside) is sweating/dripping with water and swelling. When the brick foundation swells and cracks like that, it starts making me a little nervous about the structural integrity of the house as a whole. The smell has gotten much worse as well, along with what looks to be some creeping mold (the mold in the laundry room is white/grey and quite fluffy, the mold in the furnace room doesn’t look nearly as fluffy, more of a scum).

We’ve been complaining to our landlord about it quite a bit, and she has been less than helpful. In fact, she’s been downright batty about the whole thing. She seems to firmly believe that opening windows will solve the problem (never mind that there are only two openable windows in the basement: one of which we were robbed via, and the other one opens half under the deck, and so doesn’t offer much in the way of bulk fresh air flow). Then she suggested that we get a fan, thinking that airflow would dry up the water and stop the mold. “Opening the door to the furnace room should also help,” she said “because before the renovations there was no door there.” We were not about to leave that door open full time, for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that there’s no reason why that would help clear the mold in that room (as opposed to spreading it through the rest of the house, as well as giving the cat a way in to roll in the mold and get herself disgusting). Then, to prompt us to use a fan, she came by and dropped one off (a very obviously used fan that was probably just sitting around her basement).

She’s been quite laissez-faire about the whole thing, saying things like “well, it’s and old house, and that’s just what happens to them.” Old houses might be susceptible to mold invasions, but that’s not an inevitable fate of older homes. There are many gorgeous century old homes in this neighbourhood, and with proper upkeep they’re quite habitable. When Wayfare pointed out that we both have mold allergies, she said something along the lines of “well, you hardly ever use the basement anyway, so can’t you just get like a surgical mask and wear that whenever you go down?” That was particularly not helpful.

A dehumidifier has been one good suggestion, and we tried that. There’s an old one hanging around in the furnace room that was purportedly used by the previous tenant to solve the water-coming-through-the-walls issue, but I didn’t trust it (I figured it was probably just full of mold waiting to be blown around), so I bought a new one. We ran it for two days and despite the fact that there were visible water droplets on the wall, it didn’t take any moisture out of the air — either high humidity is not the problem (and it doesn’t feel that humid in there), or the room is too cold for a dehumidifier to be effective. So we managed to return it, since it wasn’t helping. She bought us another one now anyway, but we have to go up to Sears and pick it up (if I thought it would actually do something, I wouldn’t mind…).

Then, Wayfare went by her office to drop off our rent cheque, and our landlord was all excited. She had bought something for the house:

A big thing of vinegar, and two boxes of baking soda. Yes, we will have a giant carbon dioxide volcano and that will fix our mold problems. She figures somehow that if bleach didn’t kill the mold, vinegar will (“it’s a handy household cleaner” — yeah, it is… for windows), and the baking soda will help remove the smell of death!

Me, I figure that combined with some red and green food colouring, we just got a cool Halloween prop. (Who wants to see the vampire bubble blood? Who wants to see the doll projectile volcano vomit?).

No word yet one when she’ll get someone who knows something about mold to take a look at the situation (her admittedly unreliable step son is supposed to come by some time before the end of the year to look at the problem and suggest further craziness). We’re starting to wonder if we should cut her out of the loop and start talking to her husband, who seems to have a clue but simply doesn’t care as much. My dad says that mold can be bad for the resale value of a house, and also for the health of its occupants, and if she’s dragging her feet like this then we should go over her head to a tenants’ protection association of some sort, or hire a mold specialist ourselves, without convincing her of the necessity first, and then just sending the bill to her.

There was an article in the London Free Press today about a lack of skilled workers in the city. (Note: the LFP has pretty terrible online retention, this article may not be accessible after a week).

A London company is poised to grow, hiring as sales increase — but it will have to expand outside the city.

Autodata Solutions is an example of how the shortage of skilled workers is hurting the city’s economic growth.
…
In fact, 62 per cent of companies said they faced a shortage of qualified candidates and another 29 per cent said they had trouble finding people to relocate here.
…
The most ambitious of the plans is to bring more than 1,000 students from Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario to the London Convention Centre in January to meet with businesses looking for workers.
…
For companies such as Autodata Solutions, which cannot find software developers, the labour shortage has had a serious effect.
…
Over the last year, the company has hired about 100, and it now employs about 200.

“The problem is we do not need people out of school. We need workers with three to five years’ experience. The issue is skill,” said Lisa Harrison, director of human resources. “I would prefer to grow here; we love London, we’d be happier if we could find people here.”

[Emphasis mine]

This is just retarded. It’s not that there’s a shortage of skilled workers: this is a university town, with way more skilled workers graduating every year than the city can possibly hire all by itself. The problem is with a lack of skilled, experienced workers. But companies have to realize that someone has to hire recent grads in order for them to get skilled. Yes, they’ll need a bit more training, but they also cost less at first, so it’s a bit of an investment, really. After all, someone with 3 years seniority at another company will still need to be trained to the specificities of your company. It might take only a few months instead of a year or two, but it will hardly take 3 years for a recent grad to actually catch up in the experience specific to your company. If nobody in the city hires recent grads, then the grads move away. And once they move, it’s very hard to get them to come back. While many students may come here with a plan to move to Toronto as soon as their finals are done, there must be a substantial portion who would stay if they had a local job offer within weeks of graduation.

As one advances in life beyond graduation, one tends to settle down, start a family, etc. Once that happens, it becomes hard to convince one to move cities for a job. Especially considering how difficult the “two-body problem” is to solve in London. If I am a talented, experienced software engineer, there may be a nice selection of jobs for me. But if my wife is a teacher or librarian, then there might be no work for her, and I might instead try to find a job for myself in a larger city like Toronto or Ottawa, where we could both find jobs. These factors make it much harder to lure someone away from another city as they progress in life, and again the solution appears to be hiring recent grads and training them up within the company. Get them while they’re single, then keep them while they put down roots here, and it might even help reduce turn over down the road.

If indeed this one company in London has hired 100 skilled employees over the last year, how many of those really needed to be veterans, and how many could have been trained in house? If they have a need for another 100 in the next year or two, how much easier and how much sooner could those positions be filled with local recent grads than job searches abroad? Is it better to have a position lay vacant for a year while one searches for an experienced employee than it is to hire a fresh employee and have them trained up by the end of that year?

And, moreover, how much does training cost vs. opening another branch?

The company is looking to add branches outside London and is considering the United States, Guelph and Windsor, where there are workers.

“Our growth will not be in London and the skills shortage here is a big part of the issue,” Harrison said.

There may be skilled workers in Guelph and Windsor at the moment, but with cities that are even smaller than London, how stable is that job market/pool of workers?

Tires are one of a number of very important pieces of equipment on a car, and are easily overlooked. Keeping tire pressures up can help improve fuel economy (and as long as you never exceed the sidewall pressure, they can be pumped up above what the door jamb recommends with the only side effect being a harsher ride). My old tires were starting to get a little run down after nearly 100,000 km. The legal minimum treadwear is where the wear marks are at 2/32″ tread depth, and I was at a little less than double the wear marks (3-4/32″). But, several articles don’t recommend using all-season tires in the winter with less than 4/32″ of tread, and I’m inclined to agree. I was leaning towards getting a second set of dedicated snow tires, an inconvenient practice that my dad used to do but has grown to loathe, but which everyone else recommends once they do it (snow tires really do have much better traction in the nasty stuff; as an aside, 4×4/AWD drivers should really think about snow tires since it’s “4 wheel go, not 4 wheel stop” — the tires determine the stopping part). Since London can be a little tardy when it comes to cleaning up after a snow dump, I’ve found it particularly important to drive conservatively in the winter and keep my tires in good shape.

So, I lamented for a while the decision to replace my tires, wondering instead if I should replace the car. While it does have some negative emotional associations after being stolen (twice!), and has started making a few distressing sounds, the sounds haven’t actually gotten any worse recently. It’s a good car that should have another few tens of thousands of kilometers left in it, and it just makes good economic sense to keep it running (as long as nothing else major breaks down, and no matter how cool the technology underneath a Prius is).

I replaced the tires today with Nokain WRs. The timing was decided in part by a sale at the local Kal Tire (taking about $70 off the price of four). I haven’t heard too much about these tires in most of the review sites I visited, though there was a good review of them on the Canadian Driver site. However, there has been a lot of good word-of-mouth about them around the internet, and Kal Tire also highly recommended them, so I decided to give them a try. They are a relatively new and revolutionary tire design, an all-season tire that is a “true 4 season” rather than a “3 season” tire like many others. It carries the “mountain and snowflake” severe service marking that’s only given to snow tires (the M+S marking, on the other hand, is pretty meaningless). So a lot of people are excited about having a tire that comes close to the snow/ice traction of a dedicated snow tire, without the need to switch out for the summer.

Only having driven about a kilometer I can’t really comment on their performance so far. One compromise they make is a noisier ride, but I haven’t gotten up to speeds where I could possibly say yet. I hope to do a more critical review of them after logging a few thousand kilometers of winter driving on them.

I had never been to Kal Tire before, but they seem like a decent outfit, with many locations across Canada. They were friendly, but there were some issues in getting my tires. I had first made an appointment last week, but they ended up selling the set of tires they set aside for me before I got there. Fortunately, they did call me before I left to let me know, which I think is a decent way of handling the situation. The service was fairly slow today (two guys were in the office helping customers, one constantly on the phone and one very slowly ringing up the bill of the last customer). Like many other tire outfits, they offer free rotations every 10,000 km along with a road hazard guarantee. Their prices for most services (installation, balancing, the tires themselves) seemed competitive with other locations in the city. They couldn’t quite match the Costco sale on Michelins, but then again Costco had a very limited selection for that sale. The one exception was that they quoted me $80 to do an alignment, and while I haven’t gone to get a competitive quote, that seemed a little high to me (I seem to recall my last one cost $50, and I wasn’t buying 4 tires from them at the time!).

From Wayfare:

I just realised that we’re very cult-like… Come to our party! Wear a funny costume! Drink kool-aid out of a skull!

The Halloween party is promising to be cool, you should all aim to be here!

(Though I still don’t have my costume worked out…)