Blessed by the Potato

Though the rolling-over of the calendar has very little physical or spiritual meaning (if anything, the solstice should be used for new undertakings), it is nonetheless a very common time to make resolutions for change. Here are a few handy tips for a variety of resolutions:

Exercising/getting in shape: This is a very common new year’s resolution. Perhaps the most common, so whatever you do, don’t run out and join a gym January 1st (or the 4th, whatever). My friends who do go to the gym regularly are already complaining about the influx of resolution newbies making the place crowded. If you join a gym now, it’s going to be a crowded experience, and less fun than it would normally be. Trying to exercise outside is miserable this time of year. So do yourself a favour and put a pin in that resolution, and mark your calendar for March 1st to make your new beginning.

Dieting: I am not one to talk, but it’s probably best to ease into a diet/weight loss resolution. You should get a natural boost to a weight loss plan just coming down from your post-holiday binge. The next month will be harder, and you’ll have to be even better about your diet to see improvements (losses).

Quit Smoking: The miserable weather makes deferring exercise plans a good idea, but really helps a quit-smoking plan. There are a tonne of different approaches to control cravings, modify behaviour, etc., and this isn’t the place to deal with it in detail. I will say briefly that the #1 quit-smoking motivation in my experience is a cancer diagnosis. If you were not lucky enough to get a cancer diagnosis over the holidays, there are other ways to take the initiative to quit. Procrastination can help: you don’t have to quit forever right now, you just have to put off your next cigarette until tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow). There are also some new-ish pharmaceutical treatments that can help (in addition to good old nicotine replacement like the patch and gum there’s Bupropion and Varenicline — and it is at this point that I will remind you that I’m not “that kind of doctor”).

Start Investing: Ah-ha, now more into my subject matter. This is a great time of year to start investing: you may have a bunch of cash gifts, or will have some free cash flow to save once the holiday credit card bill is paid off. A new round of TFSA contribution room just opened up, and it’s still early in “RRSP season” so there won’t be much of a wait to see someone (if you need to). If you’re not quite sure how to get started, go off and do some reading (for example, my own book: Potato’s Short Guide to DIY Investing), but don’t spend too much time on that: it’s easy to get lost becoming a near-expert on theory, and planning out a perfect-to-the-last-basis-point investment plan without actually getting around to opening an account. Particularly early on, actually starting with a “good enough” plan is better than getting it perfect — especially with one that’s easy to back out of (like a savings account, or a no-load fund with a short lock-in time like TD’s e-series funds or ING Direct’s Streetwise).

Travel more: That’s not even a resolution, that’s a wish or a plan for a one-off event. Get out of here.

Be environmentally friendly: this is a good one to break up into a few pieces, and add them as you go. January is a good time to get on the energy-efficiency kick: put on a sweater, turn down the thermostat, get that shrink-wrap film for the windows, put a grill block on your car. February is a great time to kick bottled water and start using a reusable bottle (the tap water is particularly chill this time of year, too). The spring is best for avoiding car use, and mucking around with composting/gardening.

Learn more/study more: A new term for those in school, and a great time to snuggle up in bed with a good book for those who aren’t. Go ahead and tackle this one right away.

Improve the blog: Well, posting more is a common resolution, but that is not necessarily an improvement if it’s a matter of quantity over quality. Myself, I’m cleaning up the blogroll: a few sites there have stopped posting (or equivalently, been taken over by sponsored ad posts). Self-promotion time: is Blessed by the Potato in your blogroll? If you want to start a blog, then I’d recommend starting by writing a few posts to get a feel for just writing without having to deal with the whole issue of putting it all out there for the world to comment on, or dealing with a platform (it’s pretty easy these days, but still not zero work to set up a blog).

Things that are, and that are not, in your control: in general, I think it’s important to recognize what is and what is not under your control when undertaking your new year’s resolutions. It’ll be nothing but disappointment and guilt, leading to an unstoppable shame spiral if you set some kind of new year’s goal that you actually have no power to enact. For example, you may decide to be more efficient at work and make more money, but only one of those may actually be under your control.

MOA: “I can’t see renting being better than owning long-term. I really can’t.”

I can understand that there is a lot of room for debate as to when exactly it’s better to rent than buy: there are a lot of factors to consider, and a lot of forecasting future rates or guesstimating costs. But it’s quite another when people don’t seem to understand that there is some point where that happens, as with MOA’s comment above. To try to explain it again I will say first remember that price matters.

If someone is willing to rent you a house for $1/mo, and that house costs $1,000,000 to buy, then it is overwhelmingly better to take the rental option: you can invest your million bucks in a savings account and make more than that in interest, and if you don’t have a million bucks, then even better: you don’t have to convince a bank to lend that to you, and incur the even higher interest costs. Conversely, if rent was $1000/mo, and the house was $36,000 to buy, then it would make sense to buy the house instead: you’d have it paid off in just a few years.

So the important concept is that there is going to be some cross-over point between those two extremes where rents and prices are such that it’s a break-even proposition for either choice. And beyond that point, there will be a set of prices so high and rents so low where it just doesn’t make sense to buy any more, long-term or not. Exactly where that cross-over point is depends on a lot of factors, like interest rates, how long you’ll stay, taxes, appreciation, maintenance, insurance, risk tolerance, etc., but there is that break-even point (and a regime where renting is better) somewhere.

For most of our history, we haven’t been on the other side of that line, so it seems hard to imagine: all our heuristics are geared towards a life where landlords make money and buying a house is a smart financial move. So yes, in most markets most of the time it’s better to be an owner if you’re in it for the long-term. But in Vancouver and Toronto, it’s not most of the time: we’ve crossed the line.

It’s tough to get people to grasp that concept sometimes when it’s just not in their everyday experience, even if it is at its core a simple concept. It’s like saying to people that somewhere above our heads, there’s no air to breathe. “That’s nuts,” they say “I can dig a hole and there’s air below here to breathe, and I can go up an elevator to the top of a building and there’s air to breathe. Now excuse me while I climb into my open-air rocket-ship.”

After graduating, I need to come up with a gift idea for myself. My dad doesn’t know what to get me, and I have no idea what to suggest. He’s thinking he’d like to give me something that I’ll have for a long time and might actually use, like a watch or ipad or 2nd monitor. But I can’t imagine really using any of that: I used to get like really anxious if I didn’t have a watch to know the exact time, but that phase has long since passed, and I hardly wore a watch at all the last decade or so since I found they irritated the skin on my wrist. Then once I realized I was reaching into my pocket to grab something to check the time anyway, I just started using my cellphone as a clock to cut down on the stuff in my pockets. And other than angry birds, I have no idea what an ipad might do for me that my blackberry, kobo, and laptop aren’t already doing in a superior way.

But other than shooting down his suggestions, I have no ideas of my own.

The problem is all I can think about after stretching the budget for so long is rent and groceries. Which is not helped by being faced with the prospect of my contract running out in just a few more months with no job lined up… I’m just not far enough up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to think of gift ideas right now.

I haven’t had a round-up post for a while, so let’s correct that now. Things have been pretty busy with me the last little while. Though the market has been volatile, which should be presenting opportunities, I just haven’t managed to find the time to do any real analysis for active investing. One depressing case-in-point was Armtec: I started working on a post called “Is Armtec Going Bankrupt?” on Sept 29, thinking that perhaps the answer might be “no.” I meant to finish my research on the company over that weekend, but instead found myself crawling under the car and reading Ready Player One (BTW: a good read, way more fun than annual reports). “Oh well,” I figured when the weekend came and went and I hadn’t finished my analysis yet, “I’ll just do it next weekend.” Unfortunately the market doesn’t always let us take our time with these things: the next week it was up about 100%. D’oh! Now of course, I hadn’t yet made up my mind on the company, so it’s just as likely I would have done all that reading, decided not to buy, and then had it go up 100% anyway… but I think I would have preferred that outcome to the one where I maybe might have ended up buying it on the Tuesday, and made out like a bandit by Thursday, but didn’t because I just couldn’t be bothered to get off my butt and do some DD. Ah, well, c’est la vie.

The post-doc weight loss progress has been underwhelming, but not an entire write-off. It’s been almost two months and I’ve lost a little over 2 pounds. It has ever-so-helpfully been mentioned that that could just be measurement error, which is true, so we’ll see how I make it through the difficult Halloween then post-Halloween-candy-sale then xmas-and-Boxing-Day-candy-sale gauntlet coming up.

Futurama has a great thing called the “Parade Day Parade” to consolidate all the parades which, in the 31st century New New York, would otherwise eternally tie up the streets in gridlock after accumulating a millennium’s worth of events to hold a parade over. So with all the bloody marathons and charity fun runs, I’m not surprised that conflicts are starting to arise. I don’t know what the fascination is with running along commuting routes or through downtown Toronto. Surely some of those races could be moved to the burbs, or better yet, a dedicated running trail. I guess it’s marathon brain taking over: once you run a truly suicidally stupid distance like 40 km, you must start to think you are a car, and try to plan race routes on streets.

Michael James has a good, short post asking what predictions are profitable. It’s not good enough sometimes to know what’s coming, but also to know without the rest of the market having already priced it in.

CC has a post up showing that the recent market volatility is not “unprecedented”. There have been plenty of cases of high volatility in the past. Note that much of the volatility is intra-day (I was scratching my head for a while as to how there could possibly be more 5+% days than 3+% days, until I noticed that difference in the legend).

Dave Chilton tackles the RRSP vs TFSA question. He takes a bit longer to cover it than I do in my book, but is also a little more thorough, with some humour as well. Short answer? Sounds similar to mine: TFSA is pretty good, but the RRSP is better if you’re in a higher tax bracket now (and expect to be in a lower one at retirement). Both is better yet. Oh, and don’t blow your refund.

Preet admonishes those who convert to market timing after stocks falter in the Globe: “Please. The fact that the market has already fallen should be proof enough that you have no authority to suddenly become a market timer. If you were good at it, you would have taken your money off the table before the decline.”

Then after saying something so clever and catchy, Preet goes on to try to deny the Canadian housing bubble, dragging out some of the flimsiest explanations. “Looking at debt-to-income is only part of the story. You need to see what that debt was spent on. […] A lot of that debt is mortgage debt. Housing has done well, so on the asset side, we are doing much better.” was one of the worst. I haven’t dug up the citation, but I’m sure I heard that from the Americans a few years ago. If house prices go down, the debt doesn’t go away without pain. And it’s backwards: ask not what was used to secure the debt, but what has fuelled the rise in the asset itself (answer: debt).

An x-ray tube was stolen in Markham, but the report has basically no details. I can’t even tell if it’s a Beryllium-7 source, or a regular x-ray tube with a Beryllium window (or if the radioactive Beryllium-7 part is a mistake or a minor component). I couldn’t find any information about it at the CNSC website, but then I wouldn’t necessarily expect to yet. A stolen (sealed?) source (if it’s even a source) isn’t a radiation accident, just an accident waiting to happen. (Edit: the York Regional Police release says that it’s also dangerous if broken, which suggests it is a sealed source and not just a x-ray tube).

Netbug has been glued to the development logs of Windows 8. I’m a bit slow, still loving XP on my main computer, and I have no intention of getting my hopes up for a product that may be years out, may bear little resemblance to the work presented now, and will likely be a disappointment no matter how low I set my expectations. However, the proposed task manager improvements do look neat.

New firmware has come out for the Kobo, which overcomes some of my criticisms from before: it adds the ability to annotate passages, search within a book, and my personal favourite, a low battery warning when you hit 10% and 5% of battery life remaining. It also lets you change which parts of the screen are receptive to page turns. I’ll try installing it later tonight!

There are days that I think Human Resources departments are a plague on our species, threatening to consume all productivity beneath layers of impenetrable, arbitrary bureaucracy.

Then there are days when I think that is a charitable description.

Lately we’ve been battling with HR’s notion of “new” employees. I’ve been working where I am for over 8 years now, yet since I had over a month without a contract at the end of my grad school/research assistant contract and the beginning of my post-doc, suddenly I’m a “new” employee, and have to go through the whole new employee rigmarole. Similarly, we get a group of talented summer “students” to work with us regularly each summer, for years now. Again, they’re not really new employees, yet have to go through the whole intake process each year. For employees that are only with us for 2 months (~40 working days) it’s ludicrous that HR takes 2 full days of their time away from us for non-productive paper-pushing purposes. Proportionately, HR gets more of our summer students’ time each year than most people get for vacation.

Orientation is a big one, taking up a full day. Oddly enough, it’s not about spatial orientation at all, which in this maze of a century’s worth of additions might be useful. It’s not even held at this site. They only introduced the full-day orientation requirement a few years ago, so I didn’t have to take it when I first started; no one who’s worked here for any length of time has. Yet our summer students have taken it several times. Yet each year, they have to take it all over again, supposedly because HR “couldn’t” let them work without it — what if they had an accident and didn’t know how to fill out the WSIB forms? A strange rationale, given that the orientation day for summer students doesn’t take place until about 2/3 of the way through the summer, and most employees have never taken it. Supposedly critically important, yet not so essential to actually do in a timely manner. Same for my new contract: my mandatory, useless-sounding orientation isn’t until two months after I started. What if I had an accident (or whatever peril they think the orientation is solving) in that time? And note that this is not the actually useful safety stuff like WHMIS, lab safety, radiation safety, or fire safety courses, which are either run online so they can be finished immediately (and with a minimum of pain) or outside of the HR bureaucracy entirely.

Another intake requirement is a clean TB skin test and health review. This is a very sensible intake procedure, but how valuable/hypocritical is it to only screen people when they start their jobs? Suddenly I’m a big risk if my contract lapses and I spend a month at home in my underwear studying, but as long as someone’s contract is still good they can romp through the jungle or sleep in a Guangdong chicken coop and nobody bats an eyelash. It seems to be less of a genuine concern for infection control than a form of security theatre: checking the right boxes on the form has become more important than the goal behind the creation of the policy.

But what really got me mad was my particular HR nightmare this time around. First off, my contract was late. The wonderful and helpful and competent people in my department reminded HR that it was late and they were dropping the ball, again and again. After a few pokes they finally said they’d get it to me by the end of the week. Then that week came and went. Another promise to get it to me by the afternoon. Another few days, another few promises. “By the end of the day today, for sure.” They’d say, only to say it again the next. Finally I got my contract, a full month after my start date, and almost two since my department sent them all the info they needed to fill out the contract (and, BTW, this is not a terribly unusual contract. I’m not exactly asking to be paid in Reese Pieces and Star Wars action figures here, or negotiating IP rights).

And it was wrong.

So back into the process we go, another three days until I get a corrected contract to sign. It’s now two days before the last day to get paid for the pay period, and I’m rather desperate to get everything approved. Due to not getting paid for almost 4 months*, and another client stiffing me for the freelance work I did to fill the time while I was off, I’m pretty damned desperate to get paid at this point (the emergency fund is long gone, the various reward points have been spent on groceries and gas, and the line of credit is about half drawn). I wasn’t ever really that close to the brink — not like I was going to starve or miss rent or anything — but I found out that yes, I am in fact allergic to debt, and it was making me itchy. And I legitimately didn’t want to wait another month to get paid due to their incompetence.

There are some final hoops to jump through. They need a void cheque and my SIN (again, not a new employee), and some tax forms signed. A copy of my driver’s license. Pretty standard stuff, anyway. Plus some other stuff (a quick online privacy course, an information form, signatures, signatures, signatures). But when I went in for those final hoops, thinking this was finally over, they wanted my physical SIN card, not just my number. My card, unfortunately, was stolen years ago. I never replaced it because I have never needed the physical card before. I’ve worked for the government and they didn’t need to see the physical card — only the number is needed to process you through for taxes, etc., and I’ve long since had that memorized. But no, this lady wasn’t going to let me get paid until she saw my physical card. “But I’m not exactly a new employee, don’t you have that photocopy in my file from the last time you hired me?” I said, and “You don’t really need the physical card to pay me, you should only need the number.”

“Well, we require the physical card here.” she said in a tone so flat I became certain that she was indeed a zombie, or some kind of low-powered robot.

“Can you at least get my pay process started with the number and I can come back with the card later?”

“Nope. You can’t get paid until I can photocopy the card.”

Fuck off. That part was under my breath. “But you guys have already held up my contract for a month, and now I have to wait another month for the government to mail me a card I don’t legally need?” She told me that once I applied for a new card, I’d get a letter/receipt that would act as a temporary card. So off I went to spend half a day in the government building to get my SIN card replaced.

At this point I really have to give a shout-out to my supervisor and the admin people in my department, who really went to bat for me harassing HR to make sure that they didn’t drag their feet for a few more weeks so that I could get paid that pay cycle. Unsurprisingly, with a month of back-pay to put into one bi-weekly period, too much tax was withheld, but I’m beyond caring about details like that at this point. I’ll get it back in the spring.

Back to the TB skin test: HR assigned me a date to go in and get it done, with no input from me. Whatever, I’m not going to raise a stink about getting it redone, and go. I just want to get paid. The day they give me is a Friday. The physician injects me with the subdural agent that will, in time, react with TB if I have any. Then, only after they inject me, do they ask “so, what time are you free on Monday to have that read?” Umm… huh? I’m not going to be in the city on Monday. At all. “But it has to be read within 72 hours!” Wouldn’t that have been a good thing to mention, say, before injecting me? Sheesh.

I’m an understanding guy, and I comprehend the value of policies and procedures, but there has to be a balance between having policies, and iron-clad arbitrary rules enforced by unthinking HR zombies.

What gets me though is not once was there an apology. At no time did they even attempt to sympathize with me for what they had put me through, or even slyly acknowledge that their rules were ridiculous in my situation. No “what are you gonna do, those are the rules?” shrug. If anything, they seemed to take delight in their obfuscation.

* – where 4 months comes from: almost 2 from just not being employed, 1 from HR being late on my current contract, and 1 because somewhere along the way my previous contract ended up paying me at the beginning of the month, so even though I worked and did get paid for my final month as a grad student/RA, getting paid up front (and not knowing that’s how it worked) threw my budgeting all off (I was expecting one more paycheque before having to draw from my emergency fund). Though I suppose that one was my own error in budgeting, it still contributed to the cash-flow short-fall. As a budgeting aside, my old contract’s pay schedule was messed up. I have a PhD, and was never able to figure out in advance when I was going to get paid. It averaged out to monthly, but sometimes it was the beginning of one month, then the end of the next, and sometimes then the beginning of the one after that, so the time between pay periods could be 3-4 weeks or 6-7 weeks. One time they did legitimately miss paying me due to (guess what) a HR SNAFU and it took a full extra month for me to figure out that it wasn’t just a really long pay interval but an actual problem (by the time I did get caught up, it was almost 3 months between pay periods). So having an emergency fund of a few months’ worth of expenses is not just for job losses, but also potentially having a perfectly stable job and a perfectly unstable HR/payroll department.